Received August 13, 2018, accepted October 11, 2018, date of publication November 9, 2018, date of current version

December 3, 2018.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2879189

Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things:

Standards and Applications
ALI NIKOUKAR 1 , SALEEM RAZA1 , ANGELINA POOLE2 , MESUT GÜNEŞ1 ,
AND BEHNAM DEZFOULI 2
1 Institute for Intelligent Cooperating Systems, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany
2 Internet of Things Research Lab, Department of Computer Engineering, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA
Corresponding author: Ali Nikoukar (ali.nikoukar@ovgu.de)
This work was supported by DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) and DAAD/HEC Scholarships.

ABSTRACT The proliferation of embedded systems, wireless technologies, and Internet protocols have
enabled the Internet of Things (IoT) to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical world through
enabling the monitoring and actuation of the physical world controlled by data processing systems. Wireless
technologies, despite their offered convenience, flexibility, low cost, and mobility pose unique challenges
such as fading, interference, energy, and security, which must be carefully addressed when using resource-
constrained IoT devices. To this end, the efforts of the research community have led to the standardization
of several wireless technologies for various types of application domains depending on factors such as
reliability, latency, scalability, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we first overview these standard wireless
technologies, and we specifically study the MAC and physical layer technologies proposed to address
the requirements and challenges of wireless communications. Furthermore, we explain the use of these
standards in various application domains, such as smart homes, smart healthcare, industrial automation,
and smart cities, and discuss their suitability in satisfying the requirements of these applications. In addition
to proposing guidelines to weigh the pros and cons of each standard for an application at hand, we also
examine what new strategies can be exploited to overcome existing challenges and support emerging IoT
applications.

INDEX TERMS Internet of Things, IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth, Physical layer, Medium Access Control,
coexistence, mesh networking, cyber-physical systems, WSN, M2M

I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) [1] refers to the inter-networking
of everyday objects that are equipped with sensing, com-
putation, and communication capabilities. These networks
can collaboratively interact and perform a variety of tasks
autonomously. IoT promises to play a remarkable role in
diverse application domains, such as smart homes [2], med-
ical care [3], [4], industrial automation [5], [6], intelli-
gent transportation [7], [8], resource management [9], smart
cities [10], [11], and energy management [12], [13], as shown
in Figure 1. For example, in a smart home application,
based on user prescribed settings, different monitoring and
control tasks are carried out by smart sensors and actua-
tors, such as the heating control system, air-condition mon- FIGURE 1. Applications of IoT in different domains.
itoring, and fire alarms. Closely related to the IoT are
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication [14], Wireless
Sensor Networks (WSNs) [15], Wireless Personal Area Net- The entire vision of the IoT surrounds the concept of
works (WPANs) [16] Wireless Sensors and Actuators Net- communication among smart objects, enabling them to see,
works (WSANs) [17], [18], and Cyber-Physical Systems hear, think, act, and talk to one another to make smart deci-
(CPSs) [19], [20], which are application-dependent terms. sions. It fundamentally embeds intelligence into the objects

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 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications

by utilizing ubiquitous computing, networking technologies, TABLE 1. Abbreviations.

inter-networking protocols, and applications [21]. Both wired
and wireless networks are utilized to support information
exchange at the backbone and local access networks. The
local access networks, in particular, are wireless, support
multi-hop communication, and enable mobility [22]. As these
networks are usually low-power and unreliable, they are
referred to as Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) [23].
These networks lay the necessary foundation of IoT and
contribute to making it highly accessible. The aspect of ubiq-
uitous accessibility of services and objects to mobile users is
imperative because most of the IoT services are targeted to
mobile users. Another strong aspect is the autonomous oper-
ation, where IoT helps to decentralize the decision-making
process to accomplish autonomous operations with minimal
human intervention. This autonomous feature is of paramount
importance for a multitude of industrial applications that
enable smart processes and systems. This has amplified the
vision of the fourth Industrial revolution, also known as the
Industry-4.0 or smart factory [24].
Although IoT promises to revolutionize several appli-
cation domains and enormously transform the way we
live and communicate, it imposes challenging requirements
from the networking point of view. The first essential
requirement is reliable wireless network connectivity, which
is particularly important for applications such as industrial
process automation and control, healthcare, emergency sit-
uations, disaster recovery, home safety [25]. Second, time-
liness or low latency are requirements that guarantee the
bounded and deterministic delay of data transfer between
different objects so that actions are performed on time. For
example, industrial process control systems require real-time
communication between machines and controllers. Third, the
low-power operation requirement helps the nodes save power
and avoid unnecessary communication attempts, thereby pre-
venting early death and extending network lifetime. All
of these requirements led to the development of several
standards and technologies. These standards propose differ-
ent features and protocols to satisfy the Quality of Service
(QoS) requirements of different IoT applications. However,
the practical use of these standards in different IoT appli-
cations has resulted in several limitations. These limitations
accelerated the need for further analysis in order to seek
viable solutions to meet existing and future demands of IoT
applications. In this paper, we review the existing low-power
wireless standards and technologies. We primarily focus on
the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) lay-
ers because they directly impact several performance metrics,
such as reliability, latency, scalability, and energy consump-
tion. In this paper:
– We present an overview of some of the active stan-
dardization bodies that are working on the devel-
opment of sophisticated standards and protocols
for IoT.

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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
– We discuss and analyze several low-power wireless
standards and technologies. The Institute of Electri-
cal and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 stan-
dard and its derivations such as Thread, WirelessHART,
IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Network
(6LoWPAN), and IPv6 Over TSCH (6TiSCH) are pre-
sented. We also study the Bluetooth standard and its
variants, such as Bluetooth Basic Rate and Enhanced
Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
– Various technologies and standards that share common
frequency bands, such as Industrial, Scientific, and Med-
ical (ISM), generate severe interference in a coexisting
environment. We investigate how the inherent Physical
(PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer design
of these standards and technologies help to cope with
interference issues.
– We explore the suitability of various standards across
different IoT application domains, such as smart homes,
smart cities, smart healthcare, and industrial automation.
Possible limitations of each standard in different appli-
cation domains are also highlighted.
– We emphasize the need to overcome the limitations
of the existing standards to meet timeliness, reliability,
scalability, and energy efficiency requirements of IoT
applications.
– We explain how the stringent requirements of IoT
applications and the constrained resources of objects
introduce severe challenges in terms of protocol
design.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows.
In Section III, we discuss IEEE 802.15.4, in particular,
its PHY and MAC features. Several standards based on
IEEE 802.15.4 are also presented. Subsequently, we dis-
cuss how IEEE 802.15.4e overcomes the limitations of
IEEE 802.15.4. Section IV describes Bluetooth and its radio
and link layer working principles in detail. The discus-
sion revolves around different versions of Bluetooth such
as BR/EDR and BLE. Specifically, we demonstrate the
communication principles in BLE such as beaconing and
extended connectivity features. Additionally, we point out the
limitations of each of the Bluetooth versions. Furthermore,
we explain the BLE mesh specification. Section V presents
the coexistence perspective of different standards and tech-
nologies that share the 2.4 GHz band. Other non-standard
sources of interference are also described. In Section VI,
we give an overview of the Z-wave standard. Section VII
examines IEEE 802.11ah, which is another low-power wire-
less standard operating in sub-GHz. In Section VIII, the Long
Range (LoRa) technology is presented. In Section IX, we dis-
cuss broad applications of IoT and their characteristics,
requirements, and traffic categories. We explore the suitabil-
ity of each standard relative to these application domains. In
Section X we discuss the existing surveys relevant to IoT.
Finally, a conclusion is drawn in Section XI.
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II. STANDARDIZATION BODIES
A large number of devices from different technologies
and vendors makes the IoT environment quite heteroge-
neous, which causes interoperability issues across different
application domains. To meet this challenge, we witness
several standardization bodies that accelerated the devel-
opment of low-power wireless standards and technologies.
These standards employ unique PHY, MAC, network, and
application layer enhancements to meet low-power, low-
latency, high reliability, scalability, and security requirements
of IoT applications. In the following, we describe some of the
well-known standardization bodies that are actively working
toward developing IoT protocols.
IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) [26] is the most
well-known standardization organization. It mostly targets
the lower layers in the OSI protocol stack, namely MAC
and PHY. In this paper, we focus on IEEE 802.15.4,
IEEE 802.15.1 (Bluetooth), and IEEE 802.11ah due to their
low power operation. The IEEE 802.15.4 provides the fun-
damental blocks for many of the key technologies such as
ZigBee, Thread, WirelessHART, and ISA100.11a. These
standards are detailed in Section III. Up to 2017, IEEE-SA
has published more than 1100 active standards, and it has
more than 600 standards under development [27].
ZigBee alliance [28] is an open global standard based on
IEEE 802.15.4 that is targeted to low-power wireless net-
works. The technical specifications of ZigBee are discussed
in Section III. The most common applications of ZigBee are
in home automation, industrial control, and healthcare. They
will be described in Section IX.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [29] is one
of the non-profit organizations that developed IoT standards
such as 6LoWPAN or Routing Over Low power and Lossy
networks (ROLL). IETF encourages more people to commu-
nicate and collaborate on new ideas such as improving the
IoT use cases in smart cities, healthcare, industrial Internet
and other related applications by providing solutions to over-
come issues such as scalability, timeliness, and IPv6 adap-
tation for low-power wireless networks. IETF provides a
platform where developers and researchers can collaborate
voluntarily to improve and build standards. The standard
documents provided by the IETF, such as the Request for
Comments (RFCs), can be accessed freely. For example,
(RFC4944) [30] was developed in 2007 and updated by the
drafts (RFC6282) [31], (RFC6775) [32], (RFC8025) [33],
(RFC8066) [34] up until 2017 for developing 6LoWPAN
standards. These documents cover a wide range of topics
relating to issues of routing, security, and applications in IoT.
The European Telecommunications Standards Insti-
tute (ETSI) [35] is another non-profit body (like IETF)
that works for standardization organizations in Europe.
It produces globally-applicable standards for communication
technologies for the Internet, such as fixed, mobile, and
broadcast, and short-range technologies. The Third Gener-
ation Partnership Project (3GPPTM ) is an example of the
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 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
ETSI standards. Currently, ETSI has 800 member organiza-
tions from 67 countries.
OneM2M [36] is a worldwide organization formed in 2012
that aims to provide and develop technical specifications
in order to meet architectural, security, and interoperabil-
ity requirements for M2M communication. It targets appli-
cations such as smart cities, smart grids, smart homes,
and healthcare. OneM2M cooperates with more than
200 companies.
International Society of Automation (ISA) [37] targets
industrial IoT covering applications such as security, safety,
batch control, and enterprise integration. A widely-adopted
standard developed by this body is ISA100.11a [38]. ISA has
more than 40,000 members and 140 committees, subcom-
mittees, working groups, and task forces that are working to
develop the ISA standards.
OpenWSN [39] is a project created by the University of
California, Berkeley. It aims to provide an open source plat-
form for developers and researchers to implement the IoT
protocol stack. The stack implements different hardware and
operating systems, such as OpenMote [40] and RIOT [41],
respectively. One of the important goals of OpenWSN is
the adaptation of the Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH)
concept over IEEE 802.15.4e. TSCH provides the IPv6 sup-
port in the network layer based on the IETF 6TiSCH imple-
mentation [42]. We will discuss TSCH in Section III-H.
Internet Protocol for Smart Object (IPSO) alliance [43] is
an active organization for enabling Internet Protocol (IP) con-
nectivity for smart object communication in IoT. IPSO was
founded in 2008 and targets IoT applications, such as smart
cities, home automation, healthcare, and energy management.
Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) [44] developed and
licensed Bluetooth technology. It is a non-profit organization
that was founded in September 1998. This body publishes
the core specifications for the different version of Bluetooth.
In Section IV, we will describe the different versions of Blue-
tooth developed by SIG. Currently, SIG is supported by more
than 30,000 member companies [45]. Although SIG does not
sell any Bluetooth products, it owns the Bluetooth word mark,
figure mark and combination mark, which collectively make
up the Bluetooth trademarks.
III. IEEE 802.15.4
IEEE 802.15.4 [46], which mainly defines PHY and MAC
layer specifications, is considered the defacto standard for
Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN). The
standard was developed for low data rate monitoring and
control applications that require very low power consump-
tion. Due to its appealing features such as low-power, low
cost, and moderate data rate, it is the most widely used stan-
dard for home automation [47], industrial automation [48],
[49], smart cities [50], and Wireless Body Area Networks
(WBANs) [51]. Most of the existing standards, such as Zig-
Bee [28], WirelessHART [52], and ISA100.11a [53], employ
IEEE 802.15.4 as the PHY layer technology together with
certain upper layer modifications. At the MAC layer, the
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FIGURE 2. The star and peer-to-peer network topologies supported by
the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
TABLE 2. Frequency bands of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
standard offers a flexible protocol that tries to achieve a better
trade-off among several performance metrics, such as energy
efficiency, delay, coverage, and data rate.
The IEEE 802.15.4 network supports star, tree, and peer-
to-peer network topologies as shown in Figure 2. The network
is composed of two types of devices, namely Full Function
Device (FFD) and Reduced Function Device (RFD). The
FFDs can perform activities like network coordination, rout-
ing, and sensing, whereas the RFDs are constrained nodes
that can only serve as end-devices to perform sensing tasks.
As coordinators, FFDs can form, manage, and maintain a
Personal Area Network (PAN), but a FFD can manage only
a single PAN at a time. The FFDs can also serve as routers
that relay traffic through intermediate routes from source to
destination. They can also store routing tables.
The following discussion elaborates more on the PHY and
MAC layer specifications of the standard.
A. PHY LAYER
The PHY layer uses the 2.4 GHz ISM [54] frequency band.
Different frequency bands are allocated to different regions,
as listed in Table 2.
The PHY offers services such as the transmission and
reception of PHY Protocol Data Units (PPDUs) across the
physical channel. It performs a number of suitable function-
alities like the activation and deactivation of radio transceiver,
Energy Detection (ED), Link Quality Indication (LQI), Clear
Channel Assessment (CCA), channel frequency selection,
and packet transmission and reception [46].
The purpose of the ED is to estimate the power of the
received signal within the bandwidth of the channel so that
the MAC layer can avoid interference.
CCA is a reliable method to determine any activity on
the channel before making a transmission. CCA works
based on multiple sampling of channel energy. For exam-
ple, it may sample the channel five times and report a free
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
channel if there is at least one sample less than the noise
floor. There are total 27 different channels available across
all of the bands as defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 stan-
dard. For example, the 2.4 GHz band includes 16 channels
numbered from 11 to 25, where each channel has a
bandwidth of 2 MHz and center frequencies are separated
by 5 MHz. They offer an achievable data rate of as much as
250 kbps [55]. IEEE 802.15.4 uses Direct Sequence Spread
Spectrum (DSSS) which mainly supports coexistence by
spreading the signal over a larger bandwidth.
Upon receiving a request from the MAC sub-layer,
the radio transceiver may operate in one of the three states:
transmit, receive, or sleep. The energy consumption states
of a transceiver can be classified into the following states:
transmission, reception, and sleep. During idle listening,
the device is listening to incoming packets, which may result
in overhearing packets that are not destined for it [56]. It is
observed that in most of the commercial IEEE 802.15.4 com-
pliant transceivers the energy consumed during idle listening
is almost the same as receiving or transmitting a packet [57]
and is a significant cause of energy waste. For example,
the TI CC2420 transceiver at 0 dBm output power con-
sumes 17.4 mA in transmission and 18.8 mA in idle listening
states [58].
Since nodes have constrained resources, the IEEE 802.15.4
implements duty cycling in the MAC protocol to save power.
Duty cycling allows a node to sleep by turning off its
transceivers to conserve energy periodically.
B. MAC LAYER
The standard proposes a flexible MAC that can mainly switch
between two channel access modes known as beacon enabled
mode and non-beacon enabled mode.
1) BEACON ENABLED (BE) MODE
In this mode, communication is based on a superframe struc-
ture. The superframe starts with a beacon period followed by
an active period and an inactive period, as shown in Figure 3.
The active period consists of the Contention Access Period
(CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP), while the inac-
tive period allows duty cycling. The active period is further
subdivided into 16 equally spaced parts called time slots.
The superframe information is broadcasted through beacons
at the start of the network. A beacon is a specific frame
generated periodically by the PAN coordinator to update syn-
chronization and other network related information among
the nodes. A superframe is bounded by two beacons. After the
beacon, the CAP immediately starts where nodes compete,
using slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoid-
ance (CSMA/CA) to transmit new packets to the coordina-
tor or request pending packets. To minimize the probability
of collisions over the channel, slotted CSMA/CA uses the
Binary Exponential (BE) Backoff algorithm. After the CAP
is the CFP, which contains Time Division Multiple Access
(TDMA) like Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) for transmis-
sion. GTSs are allocated by the coordinator to the nodes that
VOLUME 6, 2018
FIGURE 3. The superframe structure of the BE MAC mode of
IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
require special bandwidth reservations [59]. Nodes request
the GTSs from the PAN coordinator during the CAP. GTS can
be used either for transmission or reception, and a maximum
of seven GTSs are allowed per superframe. During the GTS,
the node has exclusive access to the channel at its disposal.
The total duration of the superframe, including active and
inactive periods, can be configured through two important
parameters known as Superframe Order (SO) and Beacon
Order (BO). The network coordinator defines the superframe
structure by a Beacon Interval (BI), which is the time between
two sequential beacons, and a Superframe Duration (SD),
which is the active duration of the superframe, as shown in
Figure 3. The values of BO and BI are related as follows [46];
for 0 ≤ BO ≤ 14
BI = α × 2BO symbols
α is known as aBaseSuperframeDuration, which is the num-
ber of symbols forming a superframe when the SO is equal
to zero. The SO defines the duration of the active period
including the beacon frame. The values of SO and SD are
related as follows:
for 0 ≤ SO ≤ BO ≤ 14
SD = α × 2SO symbols
Therefore, in the case of 2.4 GHz, the value of SD = 15.36 ×
2SO ms with a BI = 15.36 × 2BO ms. Thus, the value of
BI can be adjusted between 15 ms to 245 s [59], depending
on the value of BO and SO.
2) NON-BEACON ENABLED (NBE) MODE
No GTS allocation is employed in this mode. Nodes mainly
utilize unslotted CSMA/CA for channel access and perform
only a single CCA operation without synchronization to
backoff boundaries [60].
C. LIMITATIONS OF IEEE 802.15.4 MAC
Although IEEE 802.15.4 MAC has several appealing features
for general IoT applications, yet it has several limitations
for applications that require high reliability, low latency, and
energy efficiency, as pointed out in [61] and [62]. To address
this issue, several investigations on the performance analysis
of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC were conducted [63]–[66].
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 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
Studies in [67] show that the selection of the binary expo-
nent is random and does not take into account the number
of available nodes, the communication activity level, or the
priority of data packets, resulting in a higher likelihood of
collisions. The random nature of the binary exponent causes
nodes to sleep for prolonged periods than required. This
leaves the medium unnecessarily idle for an extended period,
impacting the throughput.
A simulation-based evaluation of slotted Carrier Sense
Multiple Access (CSMA) for beacon-enabled mode for dense
networks was conducted in [66]. The authors showed that
the backoff algorithm is not flexible for large-scale networks,
since the lower limit of the backoff delay is always 0 which
is fixed. Thus, it prevents particular ranges for the backoff
delays. Therefore, it is not sufficient to avoid collisions for
large-scale networks. The impact on the selection of the BO
and SO was analyzed based on the average delay. A node that
cannot complete its data transmission in the current CAP is
forced to defer its transmission to the following superframe.
Therefore, the node has to re-contend to access the medium
and face collisions. Such a situation makes the delay for the
data transmission not only non-deterministic and unbounded,
but it also deteriorates the throughput.
Another study on the performance of slotted CSMA/CA
for the BE mode was conducted in [63]. The authors showed
that the default values of MAC parameters, such as MAC
minimum binary exponent and number of backoffs, may
result in lower throughput and high-power consumption. This
analytical study was based on the Markov model for both sat-
urated and unsaturated periodic traffic, and it was suggested
to tune the MAC parameters to achieve better results.
Anastasi et al. [64] gave a comprehensive analysis on the
MAC unreliability problem. The authors argued that if the
power management is enabled, it will result in poor packet
delivery ratio. The reason was found to be the contention
access period and its default parameters, such as the minimum
and maximum binary exponent value, the maximum number
of backoffs, and maximum frame retries allowed.
The authors suggested that the MAC, in its current form,
is not suitable for mission-critical applications and requires
proper tuning of the MAC parameters for better performance.
Motivated by these shortcomings, several relevant stan-
dards and protocols emerged to overcome the limitations of
IEEE 802.15.4 MAC [68], [69]. We overview these protocols
and standards as follows. We will present different applica-
tions based on this standard and elaborates further on their
suitability in each application domain in Section IX.
D. THREAD
Thread [70] is an open networking stack, which has received
support from well-known organizations such as Google, Sam-
sung, Nest, Freescale, and ARM [71]. It is built on top of the
IEEE 802.15.4 PHY and MAC layer specifications, operating
in 2.4 GHz band. It is cost-effective, reliable, secure, works
at very low-power, and supports up to 250 devices in a
single local mesh network. The technology is optimized for
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FIGURE 4. The mesh networking architecture of Thread.
low latency (less than 100 ms) and smart home networking
applications, such as access control, energy management, and
light control.
It does not suffer from a single point of failure due to its
mesh networking capability, thus improving reliability.
It natively supports 6LoWPAN technology to benefit
IPv6 capability in order to support interoperability. In this
way, devices can be directly connected to the Internet and can
be accessed from anywhere. Figure 4 shows the mesh network
architecture of Thread. As shown, a typical Thread network
consists of at least one or more border routers, a router,
a leader, sleepy end-devices, and end-devices. The border
router serves as a gateway that is responsible for connect-
ing a Thread network to an adjacent non-Thread network
that operates on other physical layers like IEEE 802.11 or
Ethernet. Multiple border routers can be deployed to achieve
redundancy. This keeps the mesh network functional in case
of a failure of the single border router, thereby improving
resiliency. A router offers routing services to the network
devices. It also provides security and network joining services
for the devices that wish to join the network. A router or bor-
der router can act as a leader which is required to make
decisions for some specific functions like assigning router
addresses and allowing new router requests.
Sleepy end-devices can communicate through their parent
router and serve as only host devices, but they cannot for-
ward messages for other devices. End-devices can exchange
messages with their parent devices. At the application layer,
Thread does not impose any particular application layer pro-
tocol, however, the common light-weight protocols, such as
Constrained Application Protocol (COAP), Message Queue
Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and Extensible Messaging and
Presence Protocol (XMPP), can be used.
The standard implements several security enhancements; it
supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) [72] and its variant,
Datagram TLS (DTLS) [73]. A network-wide key is used
at the MAC that protects the IEEE 802.15.4 data frames
against eavesdropping, tampering, and targeted disruption
from outsiders.
Since Thread and ZigBee mostly share the same physical
specifications and have several features in common, it is
expected that they are likely to merge in order to create a
uniform IoT standard [74]. Although Thread claims to have
all of the features mentioned above, there are no practical
implementations or deployments available based on Thread
standard.
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
FIGURE 5. The multi-superframe structure of DSME MAC mode with
extended and reduced CAP. The shaded bars show the CFP consisting of
GTSs and the white bars show CAP. (a) DSME multi-superframe with
extended CAP. (b) DSME multi-superframe with reduced CAP.
E. IEEE 802.15.4E
IEEE 802.15.4, in its 2011 version [46], supports enhanced
physical specifications that enable a variety of applica-
tions (see section III-A). However, the standard cannot sup-
port mission-critical applications due to several limitations.
Specifically, in order to meet reliability, low latency, and low-
power consumption, which are the requirements of emerg-
ing applications like Cyber Physical System (CPS) based
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) [75], [76], smart
health care [77], and industrial process automation and
control, IEEE released an enhanced version known as the
IEEE 802.15.4e [78].
It specifically introduces five enhanced MAC protocols in
the form of MAC behavior modes. These protocols will be
elaborated in the subsequent discussion.
1) DETERMINISTIC AND SYNCHRONOUS MULTI-CHANNEL
EXTENSION (DSME)
DSME is an extension of the beacon-enabled MAC mode
of the IEEE 802.15.4. DSME does not rely on a single
channel. Instead, it uses multiple channels and has a multi-
superframe structure, which has an extended number of
GTSs. A multi-superframe consists of a collection of consec-
utive non-overlapping superframes as shown in Figure 5. The
multi-superframe structure can flexibly support both periodic
and a periodic traffic. DSME mainly targets multi-hop net-
works and uses Enhanced Beacons (EBs), which are shown
as black bars inside the multi-superframe in Figure 5. EBs
are used to announce the presence of the network and contain
information related to the size of the time slots, slot frames,
and time synchronization information to maintain synchro-
nization among the network nodes. The superframe consists
of only the active period, which is further subdivided into
CAP and CFP. Nodes in the CAP use slotted CSMA/CA for
channel access to transmit monitoring, urgent, or a periodic
data. The CAP is fixed to 8-time slots during which the nodes
should stay awake. The CFP occupies the remaining seven
slots that are known as the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs)
VOLUME 6, 2018
(DSME-GTSs), which are used to transmit time-critical data.
As mentioned before, nodes remain awake during the CAP;
however, in order to save energy, DSME reduces the num-
ber of CAP periods, and only the first superframe of each
multi-superframe uses the CAP. The rest of the superframes
inside the multi-superframe structure do not make use of the
CAP, but rather the whole period is treated as a CFP that
consists of 15 GTSs, as shown in Figure 3 (Section III-B).
DSME exploits channel diversity to select the best possible
channel in order to ensure reliability and robustness against
external interference and multi-path fading. Therefore, it is
particularly suitable for factory automation, smart metering,
and patient health monitoring.
DSME MAC mode is scalable due to its distributed nature.
Specifically, slot allocation and beacon scheduling are not
performed by a central entity, but rather they are performed
by the network devices themselves in a distributed fashion. It
is adaptive to time-varying traffic conditions and to changes
in network topology, where each pair of nodes, based on their
needs, allocates and deallocates GTS slots. Due to its adaptive
capability, it can be a good candidate for mobile networks,
where data rate requirements and topology vary over time.
It improves energy efficiency through its Group Acknowl-
edgement (GACK) option, where a single Acknowledgement
(ACK) frame aggregates the acknowledgments of multiple
data frames.
Although DSME MAC presents significant enhancements,
some of its shortcomings have been identified as follows.
For example, Rodenas-Herraiz et al. [79] pointed out the
overhead of topology change in large-scale networks. In par-
ticular, the overhead may be high due to the rescheduling of
beacon frames and/or selection of non-interfering frequency
channels, assuming the multi-superframe structure is long
enough and contains superframes of all coordinators. This
increases the energy expenditure of the devices. On the other
hand, in a dense network, DSME incurs considerable delays
due to the TDMA multi-superframe structure, where the coor-
dinator and the devices become active only in their respec-
tive superframes. Therefore, if the part of data transmission
cannot be completed in the current superframe, it needs to
be deferred to the following superframe. The coordinator and
its associated devices would have to wait for the next multi-
superframe to resume their transmission.
2) THE LOW LATENCY DETERMINISTIC NETWORK (LLDN)
LLDN targets applications that require low latency, such
as manufacturing and robotics. It only works with the star
topology and uses TDMA superframe time slots with small
packets. The duration of the superframe is fixed and has
distinctive slots, namely the beacon, management, uplink,
and bidirectional time slots. The duration of a time slot is
10 ms, and the number of time slots determines the num-
ber of devices that can communicate. Since the size of the
superframe is restricted to a certain number of time slots,
it only allows a certain number of devices to participate in
the network.
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However, in order to make the network scalable up to

more than 100 devices, the PAN coordinator can use mul-
tiple transceivers that each operate on a different frequency.
Moreover, in order to further reduce latency, LLDN makes
use of short MAC addresses to decrease frame processing
and transmission time. Similar to DSME, it also exploits the
GACK mechanism to minimize the bandwidth overhead. The
use of star topology makes LLDN more suitable for factory
automation, where a large number of nodes often communi-
cate with a central entity. However, it has some limitations in
terms of scalability, topology, and throughput.
The standard recommends using multiple transceivers in
the PAN coordinator to create various networks operating
on different channels. However, a study by Patti et al. [80]
argues that this recommendation imposes a higher cost
and greater complexity. They propose multi-channel LLDN,
which improves scalability by allowing a higher number of
nodes in the network while maintaining low cycle times with-
out the need of multiple transceivers for the PAN coordinator.
Berger et al. [81] indicate that using a star topology restricts
coverage.
They propose the extension of the star topology, which is to
collect data from two-hop sensors with the use of a relay node
strategy. The relay nodes improve transmission reliability by
retransmitting undelivered packets. The authors are of the
view that the use of reserved slots and retransmission strategy
in default LLDN reduces the number of sensor nodes per FIGURE 6. TSCH slotframe schedule based on the associated topology.
network, which impacts data throughput. (a) TSCH slotframe, it also shows sequence of transmission events within
a timeslot for a transmitter-receiver node pair. (b) The associated
topology where dotted arrows show transmission in shared slots and
3) THE Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) solid arrows represent transmission in dedicated slots.
TSCH MAC is considered one of the latest generations of
MAC protocols in the category of reliable and low-power
operation. It aims to satisfy the requirements of low-power modifications. Below, we present an overview of the TSCH
mesh networks in industrial process automation. TSCH is slot frame and its functionality.
considered the most viable MAC candidate for the IoT pro- The earlier MAC protocol of IEEE 802.15.4 (see
tocol stack because of its time and channel diversity fea- section III-B) used a single channel approach in combination
tures [82]. It incorporates mechanisms such as time-slotted with the backoff algorithm in order to avoid collisions in a
access and multiple channel communication with channel shared medium. TSCH takes a multi-channel approach by
hopping. Time-slotted channel access inherently avoids the utilizing channel hopping and maintaining a low duty cycle.
nodes that are competing for the channel, eliminating colli- Channel hopping intelligently mitigates external interfer-
sions and improving throughput. It provides every network ence and multi-path fading [86], which makes TSCH highly
node guaranteed access to the wireless medium, offering reliable and robust. Today, TSCH commercial products
deterministic latency, and builds on a communication sched- offer 99.9% end-to-end reliability while consuming an aver-
ule that coordinates the exchange of information among the age current that is below 50 µA at 3.6 V [87].
nodes. In this way, each node exactly knows when to transmit, TSCH Slotframe: A slot frame combines several time slots
receive, or sleep. TSCH achieves low-power through syn- that repeat periodically, as shown in Figure 6a.
chronization, causing the receiver to be active precisely when Not only does this periodic repetition of slot frame provide
the sender transmits. each node the opportunity to communicate in the network,
The improved design of TSCH is influenced by Time but it also helps to update synchronization and other network
Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP) which is a proprietary related information. TSCH does not define and impose a slot
MAC protocol designed by the Dust Networks [83]. TSMP frame size; instead, the slot frame size is a design parameter
became the widely accepted MAC protocol in the industrial that is decided by the application programmer. The size of the
domain, and in particular, is adopted by WirelessHART [84] slot frame can be from 0 to 1000 time slots [88]. Enhanced
for its MAC operation [52]. Standards like ISA100.11a [53] beacons are sent by the nodes to advertise the network.
and WIA-PA [85] use the core concepts of TSMP in their A time slot is long enough to send a maximum size packet
MAC design, alongside some higher layer packet format and receive its corresponding ACK. A typical value of the

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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
FIGURE 7. WirelessHART network architecture showing communication
among different kinds of devices.
time slot duration is suggested to be 10 ms. If an ACK is
not received in a defined time period, the retransmission will
follow the subsequent time slot that is scheduled for the same
(transmitter-receiver) pair of nodes. A possible communica-
tion schedule is depicted in Figure 6a. The slot frame is seven
slots long, and there are sixteen channel offsets available.
Each link is assigned a cell. Some of the cells could be dedi-
cated to only one pair of nodes, while others could be shared
cells, i.e., more than one pair of nodes can communicate in
these slots. There could be a possibility of collision in a shared
slot, but the standard implements a simple back-off scheme to
deal with it. Each node only cares about the cell it is assigned
to. For example, in Figure 6a, when node n5 transmits a packet
to node n0 , it uses time slot 3 from the dedicated time slots
and channel offset (Ch.05).
F. WIRELESSHART
WirelessHART [84] is the first open wireless industrial
standard, introduced by the HART (Highway Addressable
Remote Transducer) [89] foundation. It is mainly designed
for industrial process measurements and control applica-
tions while still being backward compatible with the HART
legacy systems. It is a mesh network with self-organizing
and self-healing capabilities in combination with a secure
and reliable communication protocol. Although Bluetooth
and ZigBee were prevalent before the release of Wire-
lessHART, they could not fulfill the stringent requirements
of industrial control applications [52]. Specifically, neither
ZigBee nor Bluetooth offered guaranteed end-to-end delay
and reliability.
1) NETWORK ARCHITECTURE
WirelessHART introduces different types of devices in the
network as shown in Figure 7: network and security manager,
gateways, access points, and field devices. The network man-
ager is responsible for computing and maintaining the com-
munication schedule and routing tables, as well as performing
the overall network health monitoring. It can query a par-
ticular field device through the gateway as requested by the
host application. The security manager and network manager
work collaboratively to provide security against intrusion and
attacks by generating a different session, joint, and network
keys [90].
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2) PHY AND MAC LAYERS
The PHY layer is based on IEEE 802.15.4 [55].
TSMP is the medium access and networking protocol
which offers reliable, robust, and low-power communica-
tion. It features time synchronized, dedicated time-slotted
access, link layer ACKs, graph-based routing, and multi-
layer security on every packet. It targets reliability of greater
than 99.99% at low-power, scalability of hundreds of mesh
nodes, flexibility to support time-varying traffic, security, and
the ability to withstand harsh industrial environments [91].
The communication is governed by a time-slotted schedule
which lets the nodes know when to transmit, receive, or sleep.
TSMP follows the same schedule scheme as of TSCH, where
the schedule is computed and is represented through cells
using different time slots and channel offsets as described
in Section III-E3.
G. IPV6 OVER LOW-POWER WIRELESS PERSONAL AREA
NETWORKS (6LOWPAN)
The underlying motivation to standardize 6LoWPAN [92],
[93] was the need to integrate constrained devices to the
Internet. IETF created the 6LoWPAN and Routing Over Low-
Power and Lossy Networks (ROLL) [23] working groups with
the goal toward standardized IP-based protocols for LLN.
The ROLL focuses on developing routing solutions for LLNs
over IPv6.
The fact that the IPv6 protocol imposes high overhead
and complexity which makes it difficult to be deployed in
constrained environments, such as the IEEE 802.15.4 net-
work. Since the MAC payload of IEEE 802.15.4 cannot be
larger than 127 bytes, the 40-byte header of IPv6 does not
leave much space for actual payload. This prompted the need
to form an adaptation layer between the network and data
link layer in order to enable IPv6 packets to fit into the
IEEE 802.15.4 specifications. Low Power Wireless Personal
Area Networks (LoWPANs) impose several constraints, such
as small packet sizes, different address lengths, small band-
width, high density of nodes, battery operated devices, poor
link quality, and duty cycling. This makes it challenging to
develop an optimized adaptation sublayer to successfully map
the service required by the network layer on the services
provisioned by the link layer [93].
In essence, 6LoWPAN defines an adaptation layer through
header compression (HC) in order to transmit IPv6 packets
over the IEEE 802.15.4 network. It supports packet fragmen-
tation and reassembly in order to meet the Maximum Transfer
Unit (MTU) requirements of IPv6, and it allows forwarding
to the data link layer for multi-hop connections [94].
The 6LoWPAN adaptation layer defines two header
compression techniques that compress large IPv6 headers
(in the best case) to several bytes. The compression
technique, 6LoWPAN-HC1, compresses IPv6 packets that
contain IPv6 link-local addresses. The size of the packet
is minimized by eliminating fields such as IP version, traf-
fic class, flow label, and hop limit. The 6LoWPAN-HC2
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FIGURE 8. Envisioned 6TiSCH protocol stack [101].
technique is proposed for the compression of UDP, TCP,
and ICMP.
The main objective in proposing the HC1 and HC2 tech-
niques was to perform compression in a stateless manner that
did not require any previous agreements between the two
nodes.
H. 6TiSCH
IETF formed 6TiSCH [95] working group to support
IPv6 over TSCH (see Section III-E). 6TiSCH contributes
to the IoT by bonding the unique features of TSCH and
IP networking mechanisms in order to produce an interop-
erable Industrial IoT (IIoT) protocol stack [96]. This will
support TSCH MAC being placed under an IPv6 enabled
protocol stack running 6LoWPAN, IPv6 RPL [97], [98], and
CoAP [99], [100]. Figure 8 shows the reference protocol stack
for 6TiSCH [101]. For the successful integration of TSCH
with upper layer protocols, 6TiSCH introduces a functional
entity that is responsible for scheduling TSCH time slots to
be sent on the network. This entity resides at the higher layer
and is known as 6TiSCH Operation Sublayer (6top).
6top is a logical link control that resides between the
IP layer and the TSCH MAC layer. It controls the TSCH
schedule, collects the connectivity graph, and monitors and
optimizes the schedule of the cells. It supports both cen-
tralized and distributed scheduling approaches. The sched-
uled cells are labeled as either hard cells or soft cells. Hard
cells cannot be dynamically reallocated by 6top. Rather, they
are typically scheduled by a scheduling entity such as Path
Computation Entity (PCE), that can move or delete cells in
the TSCH schedule. In contrast, soft cells can be reallocated
by the 6top dynamically. Typically, a distributed scheduling
entity schedules these cells. 6top records the performance of
the cells to the same neighbor. If a cell performs poorly com-
pared to the other cells with the same neighbor, it moves the
cell to a different channelOffset and slotOffset, where chan-
nelOffset and slotOffset perform better. In this way, the 6top
sublayer can cope with the interference reliably.
IV. BLUETOOTH
In this Section, we discuss the history of Bluetooth tech-
nology and technical details such as radio, link layer, and
network topology. Bluetooth is a low-power wireless tech-
nology used for short-range communication. It was designed
to replace serial cables with the wireless links [102]. Nowa-
days, aside from connecting devices like mice, keyboards,
cell phones, headsets, and multimedia devices, it is used to
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connect sensors, actuators, controllers, and critical wireless
infrastructures. Availability is one of the main advantages of
Bluetooth. The Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) research
group predicted that by 2021 there would be 48 billion
devices connected to the Internet, 30% of which would be
Bluetooth enabled [103]. Bluetooth was introduced in 1999,
and the first specification was released in 2001 [104]. In 2002,
IEEE assigned the 802.15.1 standard for it [105].
The technology is divided into two major categories:
First, Bluetooth Basic Rate and Enhanced Data Rate
(BR/EDR) refers to the earlier versions of Bluetooth mainly
designed for file transmission and audio streaming. It is
reported that in 2015, 116.32 million BR/EDR headsets
were shipped [106]. Second, BLE refers to the recent ver-
sions of Bluetooth targeting low-power consumption for
IoT applications. Due to the consumer demand for low-
power and high throughput, both BLE and BR/EDR are
available in some devices like smartphones and laptops. They
are known as dual-mode Bluetooth and switch the proto-
col stack from BR/EDR to BLE and vice versa when is
needed [107]. Table 4 highlights the key features of each
version.
A. BLUETOOTH BASIC RATE AND ENHANCED DATA RATE
The first version of BR/EDR was only designed for file
sharing by using an Asynchronous Connection-Less (ACL)
link. The link is a single point-to-multiple point link that
can be used for broadcasting data and can support both
asymmetrical and symmetrical connection. The audio stream-
ing capability has been added to BR/EDR by using a Syn-
chronous Connection-Oriented (SCO) link in v1.2. The new
link provides up to three symmetrical point-to-point links
that reserve time slots in order to guarantee timely trans-
mission. To avoid delay in voice transmission, SCO packets
do not deliver ACKs. In 2003, SIG enhanced the link and
released eSCO to improve voice transmission reliability. The
higher quality is achieved by employing a limited number of
re-transmissions for lost or damaged packets. Additionally,
this version employs Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH)
to improve coexistence with other wireless protocols [108]
(Section V discusses AFH in detail). Bluetooth versions up
to v1.2 provide a maximum throughput of 721.2 kbps, known
as Bluetooth Basic Rate (BR). Due to the high demand for
large file and audio transmission, BR was unable to fulfill
the throughput requirements. Therefore, in 2004, SIG intro-
duced Bluetooth v2.0 to improve throughput and named it as
Bluetooth Enhanced Data Rate (EDR). This version increased
the throughput by 2.1 Mbps by using the Differential Phase
Shift Keying (DPSK) modulation technique [109]. Although
EDR tries to improve the data rate, it does not satisfy the
entire user requirements. Thus, in April 2009, SIG launched
Bluetooth v3.0, known as Bluetooth High Speed (HS) [110].
Bluetooth HS delivers up to a 24 Mbps data rate by using the
802.11 radio. Alternative MAC/PHY (AMP) controller [111]
changes the radio from BR/EDR to 802.11 and vice versa.
AMP enables the 802.11’s radio when higher throughput is
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
FIGURE 9. BR/EDR, BLE, IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.11 sharing 2.4 GHz frequency band.
required. After that, it reverts to primary BR/EDR radio to
save power.
1) BR/EDR RADIO
The radio operates on the 2.4 GHz ISM band at frequencies
between 2402 to 2480 MHz. It uses Gaussian Frequency
Shift Keying (GFSK) modulation with three output power
classes: class one has the maximum output power 100 mW
and achieving communication range 100 m, class two and
class three support output power 2.4 mW and 1 mW, respec-
tively. The communication range of class two and class
three is almost 10 m. Power classification improves energy
efficiency and avoids interference with other networks by
reducing the communication range. For example, a few meter
communication ranges satisfy the user requirement for Blue-
tooth headphones and a smartphone. Lowering the signal
propagation range reduces noise for other wireless networks
in the vicinity. The physical channel is subdivided into 1,
3, or 5 time slots; each time slot is 625 µs and Time Division
Duplex (TDD) provides full duplex transmission. In TDD,
both the uplink and downlink can transmit information in the
same frequency by using a synchronized time interval which
resolves contention over the wireless channel. In BR/EDR,
the frequency band is divided into 79 channels, and each
channel is 1 MHz wide. Figure 9(a) shows the channel assign-
ment of BR/EDR. The radio uses the Frequency Hopping
Spread Spectrum (FHSS) technique to avoid interference
from any coexisting Bluetooth devices with other technolo-
gies that share the same frequency band. In the FHSS tech-
nique, the radio switches the transmission channels 1600
times per second; therefore, if a transmission encounters
noise on one channel, there is a chance that the next channel
VOLUME 6, 2018
would be free of noise. In Bluetooth v1.2, AFH added a
technique that blacklists the channels based on traffic load as
good or bad channels. This minimizes the chance of collision
by only performing transmission in the good channels.
2) NETWORK TOPOLOGY
In BR/EDR, devices communicate in a network called a
piconet. A piconet is a star based topology, in which a node
can only communicate with a central node called master and
the others are called slaves. In the master node, the built-in
clock is responsible for synchronizing master-slaves commu-
nication. The slave nodes receive an inquiry message from
the master node to identify the address and clock phase. With
this information, the slave nodes can compute the channel
hopping sequence to identify when and on what channel
to listen. The slaves can only initiate communication after
receiving permission from the master node. There are two
types of slave nodes: active and parked. In a piconet, one
master, up to seven active slaves, and up to 255 parked slaves
can coexist. Therefore, in order to address the active and
parked slaves, three and eight bits are required respectively.
The master node continuously polls the active slaves to see if
they have data to transmit. If an active slave does not respond
to the polling for a long period, it loses its three-bit active
slave address and becomes a parked slave by obtaining an
eight-bit address. For the parked slaves to rejoin the network,
the master node periodically checks their status if they have
any data to transmit. If so, the master node reassigns the three-
bit active slave address.
Since each piconet uses its own frequency pattern that is
generated by the master node, it would be possible for several
piconets to coexist. As shown in Figure 10, neighboring
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 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
FIGURE 10. A sample of Bluetooth scatternet formation. Although
Bluetooth is a star-based technology, node role switching enables
connection establishment with other networks in vicinity.
piconets can join and construct a new network topology called
a scatternet. A scatternet is a combination of two or more
piconets through node sharing. With this, a slave can be
shared by two piconets, or it can be a master in one piconet
and a slave in another. In this way, by combining piconets,
Bluetooth can extend the number of nodes in the network.
For example, in Figure 10, the nodes are organized into three
piconets: A, B and C. However, the piconets can communi-
cate with each other using the shared nodes. The shared node
between piconets A and B switches the roles from a slave in A
to a master in B and vice versa. On the other hand, the shared
node in piconets B and C remain as a slave in both.
3) LINK CONTROLLER
Bluetooth does not support the OSI model or the TCP/IP
protocol stack because it has its own MAC protocol for com-
munication management called the link controller. Figure 11
shows the state diagram of the link controller in BR/EDR.
There are three primary states: standby, connection, and park.
The standby state is the default state that waits for the connec-
tion event. It is designed to save power when the connection
is not required. The connection state is when the BR/EDR
radio turns on to discover devices in the vicinity and starts
exchanging information if they are ready to communicate.
Park mode is a deep sleep mode that helps to save power when
the connection is not required for a long period. Only slaves
can switch to this mode. They receive the synchronization
packet periodically, and, once received, they can then join the
network whenever it is needed. Before switching from the
standby mode to the connection state, there are some sub-
states such as Device Discovery and connection establish-
ment. The connection establishment sub-state discovers the
devices that are willing to initiate the connection. The Device
Discovery sub-state has three sections. In the inquiry section,
the device that attempt to initiate the connection hops among
32 out of the 79 channels, which are known as the inquiry
channels, and broadcasts ID packets. For channel hopping,
it uses the built-in clock and pseudo-random numbers to
generate the pattern. On the other side, the device that is
about to become discoverable switches to the inquiry scan
state and waits for the expected ID packets in the inquiry
channel. It listens for 1.28 s in every channel. It switches the
channels slower than the device that broadcasts the ID packet
67904
FIGURE 11. Link controller state for BR/EDR designed for communication
establishment and power saving.
in order to increase the probability of handshake at the same
time and the same channel. After receiving the ID packet,
it replies in the inquiry response state with the Frequency
Hop Synchronization (FHS) packet. The packet contains the
node’s address, the clock value, and value used for synchro-
nization. After the devices are discovered and the packets
have been exchanged, the connection establishment sub-state
starts. This state is much faster than the inquiry state because
both devices know each other’s frequency and clock infor-
mation. The previously discovering device changes to the
page state and becomes the master node while the discovered
device changes the state to page scanning and becomes the
slave. After defining the roles, the connection state starts.
The master polls the slaves and waits for the response from
the slaves. During the connection state, the device can be
in one of three modes: sniff, active and hold. In the active
mode, the master node keeps scheduling the slaves by trans-
mitting POLL packets. The packet exchange stops in the
hold mode, and the master and slave nodes get informed
about the duration of time that they need to hold. The sniff
mode is designed to save the battery. In this mode, during
the connection the device can be temporarily absent from the
piconet. For example, a device that is not operating, such as
a mouse or keyboard, puts itself in sniff mode and transitions
to the active mode when needed.
4) LIMITATIONS OF BR/EDR
Two major limitations of BR/EDR are high power consump-
tion and lack of scalability. Although BR/EDR uses the
standby state, parked mode, and effective duty cycling to save
energy, these techniques are not enough to guarantee the low-
power consumption requirement of some IoT applications.
A major disadvantage of BR/EDR is high power con-
sumption. This is because of continuous polling of the
slave nodes by the master node in the absence of data
to transmit. Many studies address this problem and pro-
pose scheduling algorithms for polling the slave nodes
such as, [112], [113], and [114]. Chakraborty et al. [115]
proposed a solution for adaptive polling of slave nodes.
In their method, the master node polls the slave based
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
on the probabilistic scheduling estimation. This allows
the node to reduce power consumption by extending its
standby time. Also, in [116], the performance of different
scheduling algorithms, such as pure round-robin, gated
round-robin, and exhaustive round-robin for polling the
slave nodes in BR/EDR have been evaluated using OPNET
simulator.
The second reason behind the high power consumption
of BR/EDR is the scanning of a large number of chan-
nels (32 channels) for Device Discovery. For example,
Duflot et al. [117] pointed out the issue and proposed a
probabilistic model to scan the inquiry channels. They also
analyzed the power consumption performance of Device Dis-
covery in the best and worst case scenarios. In [118], the effect
of Device Discovery complexity on power consumption has
been analyzed. They proposed the adaptive rendezvous proto-
col as a method of optimizing Device Discovery performance.
The lack of scalability and mesh networking are other
weaknesses of BR/EDR. This version of Bluetooth only sup-
ports a maximum number of eight nodes, and slave nodes are
not able to connect to each other directly because of the star-
based topology. This standard has been primarily developed
for the scenarios in which a computer plays a master node
role, and a limited number of devices, such as a mouse,
keyboard, and headset, are connected as slaves. Scatternet is
one of the most highlighted solutions for performing mesh
networking and improving the scalability of BR/EDR. Scat-
ternet is a formation that is not natively supported by the core
specification, but there is a huge amount of research that pro-
poses scatternet-based solutions or improves on the scatternet
formation. For example, Jedda et al. [119] mentioned the time
efficiency problem in scatternet formation and proposed an
algorithm to solve this challenge. They also compared the
performance of other scatternet formation algorithms, such as
BlueStars [120] and BlueMesh [121]. In [122], the problem
with scatternet formation, specifically, was that the network
overhead was caused by an increased number of bridges that
were switching the piconets. This increases the probability
of packet loss. Reference [123] analyzed the performance of
algorithms for Bluetooth scatternet formation namely, Blue-
Trees [124], BlueStars and the BlueNet protocol [125], and
revealed the problem of time-consuming Device Discovery
in a scatternet network. In general, these works conclude that
scatternet is not a reliable and robust solution for Bluetooth
networking, specifically due to the discovery delay and rout-
ing challenges.
B. BLUETOOTH LOW ENERGY (BLE)
BLE, introduced by SIG in 2011, was created for low-
power wireless applications that did not require high through-
put. To achieve low power consumption, the link layer,
PHY layer, and packet formats were redesigned. In addition,
while BR/EDR designed for only two-way communication,
BLE devices are capable of acting only as either a transmit-
ter or a receiver. For example, a remote control only needs
to transmit a short command, and it does not need to receive
VOLUME 6, 2018
a response. On the receiving side, a TV or lamp acts only
as a receiver, waiting for a command to act. This results
in design simplification, yielding higher power efficiency.
In December 2013, SIG released the first update (v4.1) for
the technology [126]. This update can be applied over the air,
and no hardware change is required. In the first version of
BLE, the devices were only able to establish a connection as
master or slave. However, in the new update, the link layer
is redesigned and allows devices to switch their roles when
needed. One year later, SIG made noticeable changes and
released version 4.2 [127]. In this new update, the actual
payload size was increased from 27 Bytes to 251 Bytes.
Increasing the payload size while keeping the same packet
format increased the throughput up to 2.6 times more. This
increase in the packet size also increased the feasibility of
IPv6 support. Although version 4.2 does not support IPv6 in
the core specifications, IETF published RFC (7668) [128]
to provide IPv6 support over BLE with the adaptation of
6LoWPAN protocol stack. Bluetooth 5, introduced in Decem-
ber 2016, is the latest version of BLE [129]. Its main aim is to
overcome the limitations of the older versions by increasing
the range, size of advertisement payload, and throughput. The
extension in range provides indoor application coverage and
even enables building-to-building connectivity. In addition,
advertisement extension was introduced in this version in
order to increase the advertisement payload up to 8 times
more by using data channels as secondary advertisement
channels. This opened a new domain of applications for
Bluetooth beacons. The last improvement was increasing the
data rate by doubling the modulation rate, also called BLE
high-speed mode. This mode helps lower power consumption
because of the shorter radio operation time that is needed
for transmitting the same amount of data. It also improves
the coexistence of the technology with other devices through
shorter occupancy of air time. An application of this mode is
over-the-air-update of IoT devices.
1) RADIO
As Table 4 shows, the general transmit power range in BLE
is between −10 dBm and 10 dBm. However, theoretically,
version 5 supports output power up to 20 dBm. Similar to
the classic version, the PHY layer in BLE operates in the
2.4 GHz frequency band. In contrast to BR/EDR, it has
40 channels, and each channel is 2 MHz wide. Among these
channels, there are three special channels called advertise-
ment channels. As shown in Figure 9(b), these channels are
placed in the center frequency of 2402 MHz, 2426 MHz,
and 2480 MHz and are specified with a gray color. The
reason for choosing these frequency centers is to avoid the
most common cause of interference in the 2.4 GHz, which
is IEEE 802.11b/g/n. Since IEEE 802.11 b/g/n channels are
22 MHz wide, they overlap. Therefore, the conventional tech-
nique is to use only none-overlapping channels which are
channel 1, 6, and 11. Thus, advertisement channels are strate-
gically located in places that have minimum interference
with non-overlapping channels in IEEE 802.11 b/g/n [130].
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FIGURE 12. BLE link layer state has five states: Standby, Scanning,
Advertising, Initiating, and Connection.
Advertisement channels are used for various purposes, such
as Device Discovery, connection establishment, and broad-
casting. In BR/EDR 32 channels are assigned for connection
initiating which causes significant power consumption and
delay. Where BLE reduced initiating links down to three
advertisement channels that the receiving device needs to
scan. By limiting the number of channels, connection estab-
lishment is faster and more power efficient compared to
BR/EDR. Although both versions use the FHSS and AFH
to cope with interference, only data channels are involved
in frequency hopping in BLE. Data channels are channels
that are reserved for information exchange. Please note that
BLE 5 in advertisement extension mode uses data channels
as secondary channels for advertisement. Before switching
to data channels on the sender side, the device sends a special
PDU in the advertisement channels and returns to sleep.
In the receiver side, the device listens to these channels to
pick up the PDU. Finally, GFSK modulation is used for radio
transmission. The modulation rate is 1 Mbps, except in the
BLE 5 high-speed which is 2 Mbps.
2) LINK LAYER
Compared to BR/EDR, the new link layer has been simplified
to reduce the power consumption and provides a faster con-
nection establishment [131]. BLE has only a single packet
type, instead of the 17 types of packets that are used in the
BR/EDR. In particular, BR/EDR has a specific packet for-
mat for different modulations and file or voice transmission,
on the other hand, BLE omitted the voice streaming capability
and only has GFSK modulation. This simplifies the pro-
cessing of resource-constrained devices. Connection estab-
lishment only requires scanning advertisement channels.
Subsequently, based on the PDU format received, it either
switches to data channels or receives the broadcast data [132].
Figure 12 shows the state machine of BLE, which has five
states.
• Standby is the initial or default state. This state is
designed to save power, and no sending or receiving
happens in this state. The device may switch to this
state from any other state. For example, after advertising
device returns to standby mode to save power.
• Advertising is the first step for any BLE connection.
In the link layer, advertisement channels are respon-
sible for broadcasting PDUs. Based on the reason
for advertising, these PDUs are classified as either:
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FIGURE 13. Advertisement and scanning process in BLE. (a) shows the
advertising device, and (b) shows the process in a scanning device.
non-connectable advertising, connectable advertising,
discoverable advertising, directed advertising, scan
request, scan response, or connect request [133].
Advertising may result in communication establish-
ment or merely broadcasting data. Figure 13(a) shows
the process in the advertising state. During the
Adv_Interval, devices send the same PDU in the adver-
tisement channels (channels number 37, 38, and 39),
return to the standby state for the duration of Adv_Delay,
and then repeat the process.
• Scanning state is divided into two parts: passive scan
and active scan. In the passive scan, the receiver only
listens to the advertised packets and does not respond.
In the active scan, the receiver may respond the received
packet to get more information in order to make the
connection.
• Initiating happens when the initiator receives the packet
from the advertiser, and it responds to the packets by
sending initiating packets.
• Connection is only required when the devices need to
switch to data channels and exchange information. The
advertising device becomes the master node, and the
initiating device becomes a slave node. Then, the adver-
tisement channels hand over the responsibility to the
data channels by employing the AFH. After the connec-
tion ends, the device is only allowed to transition to the
standby state.
C. BLUETOOTH BEACON
The idea of Bluetooth beacons was first introduced by Apple
and named as iBeacon [134]. A Bluetooth beacon is equipped
with BLE and was designed to be an simple one-way com-
munication channel. Due to the low-power consumption of
BLE, these beacons can operate for several years with a small
battery. The concept of beaconing in Bluetooth refers to the
periodical broadcasting of small pieces of information, such
as sensor data or marketing information. Bluetooth beacons
have applications in many areas, such as train stations, smart
parking, and indoor positioning in order to help people by
providing a platform directly to their smartphones. Currently,
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
FIGURE 14. Connected region and transitional region in BLE 5 long range.
there are various types of BLE beacons are available in
the market, such as Eddystone [135], which is developed
by Google in 2015. Today, the availability of Bluetooth in
smartphones allows people to interact with the technology
easily. The maximum payload size for advertisement chan-
nels is 31 B. However, this is only enough to broadcast a short
message with a limited number of characters. For example,
in marketing applications, the packet size is not able to carry
enough information to introduce the products. On the other
hand, increasing the packet size creates other complications.
For example, [136] shows that increasing the packet size in
advertisement channels may result in significant interference
in dense BLE environments. In Bluetooth 5, advertisement
extension provided a solution to this problem.
D. BLUETOOTH 5
Bluetooth 5 added new features to the previous versions.
As shown in Figure 9, channel allocation in this version is the
same as the older versions. However, the maximum transmit
power increased from 10 dBm to 20 dBm. As mentioned ear-
lier, the boldest enhancements in this update are an increase
in range by employing Forward Error Correction (FEC),
utilizing advertisement extension by using the data channels
as secondary channels, and increasing the throughput by
doubling the modulation rate [142]. We explain these features
as follow.
1) BLE CODED AND FEC
One of the major issues in IoT devices is the range limitation,
and Bluetooth-enabled devices are not an exception. Gen-
erally, common solutions for range extension are mesh net-
working and increasing transmission power. Mesh network-
ing and IPv6 extend communication range by routing packets
to reach their destination. This causes network traffic and
consumes power from other nodes as well. On the other hand,
increasing transmission power to achieve more extended
point-to-point connectivity causes higher power consumption
in the transmitter. To avoid these problems, the FEC feature is
added to BLE. Typically, wireless propagation of waves (tran-
sitional region) is much longer than the connected region.
In BLE connected region is where the acceptable Bit Error
Rate (BER) in the receiver side is less than 10−3 bits. For
example, in Figure 14, node C can receive the signals from
node A. However, due to path loss and interference, bits are
corrupted, and data is not reliable.
In FEC, several bits represent a single bit. If the receiver
bits get corrupted, it can identify and recover these bits based
on the pattern that represents each bit. Therefore, using a
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FIGURE 15. BLE 4.2 and 5 (LE1M, LE2M) packet format.
higher number of redundant bits makes it easier to recover the
bit. There are two options available in version 5 for coding:
S = 8 and S = 2. This means that it replaces a single
bit with 8 and 2 bits, respectively. This feature increases the
range up to 4 times and enables Bluetooth 5 to cover an entire
house or extended outdoor area. Due to the extra bits added to
the packet, the actual bit rate per second drops from 1 Mbps
down to 125 kbps in S=8 and down to 500 kbps in S=2 [143].
It is important to note that due to the extra bits, the larger
packet is more sensitive to interference due to the longer
transmission time.
2) ADVERTISEMENT EXTENSION
Since only three advertisement channels are available in BLE,
an increase in the payload size will increase the traffic in
these channels. Because of this, advertisement extension only
uses the advertisement channels to address the next packet in
data channels. To initiate this feature, the device sends the
first packet, which includes the pointer to the channel that is
randomly selected from the 37 data channels. The randomly
selected channel is known as the secondary channel for adver-
tisement. Figure 15 shows the packet format in advertisement
channels and the data channels. The transmitted packet in
the main advertisement channels has a maximum payload
of 37 B; however, the secondary advertisement channels can
carry up to 255 B in their payload. Furthermore, it is also pos-
sible to extend the payload by adding the next packet address
and making a chain for data streaming applications. Before
this, frequency hopping was only applied in the connection
mode. Since the data channels are randomly selected as the
secondary channels in advertisement extension, the receiver
needs to know the channel number and time to listen. There-
fore, the primary packet broadcasted by the advertisement
channels must contain the hopping pattern. Marco et al. [144]
performed a simulation experiment to evaluate the perfor-
mance of service ratio, communication delay, and battery life,
when advertisement extension is used. They claim that adver-
tisement extension offers better performance compared to
the connection-oriented and the basic advertisement in BLE
concerning the factors above. However, they also pointed out
the issues of higher losses, in comparison with connection
mode, and latency, compared to the basic advertisement.
3) BLUETOOTH 5 2 Mbps
In BLE 5 increasing the speed is an optional mode known
as 2 Mbps version. This mode only operates on data channels
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TABLE 3. Bluetooth 5 support SoC comparison.

and increases the throughput by doubling the modulation rate.

One of the applications for this mode is upgrading the IoT
device’s firmware over the air. In this case, higher speed helps
saving energy by reducing the duty cycle, besides, shorter
over the airtime minimizes the probability of the collision
with other operating networks in the frequency band. Please
note that BLE 5 maintained the 1 Mbps as the default mode
to support backward compatibility with the older versions.
Because every packet transmission requires a gap called
Inter-frame Space (IFS) between packets and ACK to guar-
antee a successful transmission, the actual throughput in BLE
is less than the modulation rate. In BLE IFS is defined as
150 µs for all the versions, but packet transmission and ACK
periods vary based on the modulation rate. For example, FIGURE 16. BLE packet transmission.

as shown in Figure 16 although the packet size in v5 2 Mbps

has one more octet, the transmit time is almost half of the
v4.2 and v5 1 Mbps. This also explains the shorter period
for ACK. Packet_Transmission_Time = (Packet_size × 8)/
Modulation_rate, however, in order to achieve the actual
data rate only the payload of the packet has to be consid-
ered. Therefore, the actual throughput can be computed by
Equation (1).
Lpayload
Throughput = (1)
Tframe + IFS + ACK + IFS
Where, Transmit_packet + IFS + ACK + IFS are in µs and
Payload is in bits. From the Equation, it can be observed that
the actual payload for v5 2 Mbps is (251 × 8)/(1064 + 150 +
40 + 150) = 1.4Mbps. Consequently, v5 2 Mbps is 1.7 and
4.6 times faster than v5 1 Mbps/4.2 and 4.0/4.1 respectively.
E. BLUETOOTH MESH
Draves et al. [148] showed the importance of mesh net-
working over WPAN. Although Qualcomm introduced a pro-
prietary Bluetooth mesh known as CSRMesh [149], in the
official Bluetooth mesh specification was later released by
SIG in July 2017 [150]. Prior to this, Bluetooth suffered
from shortcomings such as a single point of failure, limited
network size, and range extension. Bluetooth mesh allows
3200 nodes to operate in a network. It enables a wide range of
applications, such as in smart homes and industrial automa-
tion, where scalability is a major issue.
The new software stack supports the BLE versions
4.0 through to 5. The more nodes joining the network,
the more robust and reliable the network will be due to the
nature of mesh networking and the ability to have multiple
available paths for routing. Nodes in Bluetooth mesh are
divided into several types. The first type is the low-power
nodes that mostly rely on battery power [151]. They have
the responsibility of transmitting or receiving information and
going back to sleep for the defined period. Another type is
called the friend nodes. They are mostly connected to the
main power grid. Due to the lack of power limitation, they can
perform more complex tasks. Friend nodes store the incoming
message for low-power nodes. BLE shares the radio and link
layer with Bluetooth mesh in order to adopt any BLE-enabled
devices to work with mesh networking.
F. LIMITATIONS OF BLE
Although BLE has many benefits, such as low-power con-
sumption, beaconing, and availability in many devices, there
are some issues associated with it. It still needs to rely on dual-
mode devices and BR/EDR for audio streaming and bulky file
transmission. There are studies in which researchers tried to

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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
TABLE 4. Comparison of Bluetooth Standards.
implement audio transmission over BLE. Gentili et al. [152]
introduced BlueVoice and examined the feasibility of voice
transmission over BLE. They also mentioned the require-
ments, such as using 64.3 kbps bandwidth to transmit voice
quality of 16 kHz. In their experiment, they measure the
power consumption, memory, and processing requirements.
Another limitation is the lack of seamless IPv6 connectiv-
ity in the core specification. This leads to a dependency of
BLE on other networks like Wireless Local Area Network
(WLAN) or LTE to translate the Bluetooth packets to IP pack-
ets [131], [153], [154]. For example, a BLE-enabled smart-
watch is unable to transmit heartbeat information directly
to the Internet. It has to be done in two steps. First, this
information has to be forwarded to a smartphone. Then,
the smartphone converts the BLE packet to an IP packet to be
routable over the Internet and transmits it via WLAN or LTE.
V. COEXISTENCE IN 2.4 GHZ SPECTRUM
Wireless networks are susceptible to radio interference. The
impact of interference becomes even more deteriorated if
they operate in the same frequency band because it causes
disruptive effects in the transmission [155]. Interference
can cause packet loss, latency, jitter, false alarms, and
synchronization errors [155]. All of these adverse effects,
in particular, cause severe problems for mission-critical appli-
cations. As the 2.4 GHz band is unlicensed globally, many
technologies use this band for their devices throughout the
world, thereby, making the band more crowded. In 2003,
the IEEE 802.15.2 task group [156] published standards for
the coexistence of WPAN with other wireless networks. How-
ever, raising awareness of the new techniques and technolo-
gies do not solve the entire coexistence issue.
The problem of coexistence among BR/EDR, BLE,
IEEE 802.15.4, and IEEE 802.11 networks is causing
major difficulties in terms of delay and power consump-
tion in IoT networks. The issue of coexistence has got-
ten further momentum due to the fact the emerging stan-
dards like WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and IEEE 802.15.4e
share the same license-exempted ISM band, resulting in the
VOLUME 6, 2018
2.4 GHz frequency band being more crowded. Due to the
massive proliferation of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 net-
works, the possibility of interference would deteriorate
application-specific QoS parameters. These networks exist in
large numbers today and operate in close proximity to a num-
ber of application domains. Suitable interference avoidance
solutions need to be adapted in order to maintain the required
service.
As presented in Figure 9 the different wireless technologies
operating in the 2.4 GHz band. In Figure 9(a), BR/EDR is
operating between 2402 MHz to 2480 MHz. It divides the
frequency into 79 (1 MHz wide) channels and uses AFH
to avoid collisions. Figure 9(b) shows BLE, which has 40
channels that are 2 MHz wide and also uses AFH. The only
difference is that the advertising channels (specified with
the gray color) have the responsibility of initiating the con-
nection in connectable mode, and they are not involved in
the frequency hopping. As mentioned in Table 4, to achieve
longer coverage, the maximum transmit power in BLE 5 is
increased from 10 dBm to 20 dBm, compared to the earlier
version of BLE. Figure 9(c) shows channel assignment for
the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Channels from 1 to 10 for the
868 −868.6 MHz and 902 −928 MHz bands are defined for
lower frequency ranges, whereas the channels from 11 to 26
are operating in 2.4 GHz band. Each channel is 2 MHz wide,
and the center of each channel is 5 MHz apart. Figure 9(d)
depicts the channel assignment of the IEEE 802.11b stan-
dard in the US. There are 11 channels, each 22 MHz wide.
These channels overlap with each other, and in the best case
scenario, we can only have three non-overlapping channels:
channel 1, 6, and 11. However, the IEEE 802.11 standards
have several versions, and the channel assignment differs in
some countries.
A. COEXISTENCE OF IEEE 802.15.4 AND IEEE 802.11
IEEE 802.11, more widely known as WiFi, is the ubiq-
uitous technology defining standards for WLANs. Today,
WiFi devices are everywhere, and they are causing
severe interference with IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Unlike
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 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
IEEE 802.15.4 devices, IEEE 802.11 devices operate at a
high transmit power, high data rate, and long range. Since
they are unable to sense IEEE 802.15.4 devices, they create
strong interference with them. In terms of channel bandwidth,
both IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 channels are asym-
metric, i.e., each IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 channel
has bandwidth 5 MHz and 22 MHz, respectively. This causes
overlapping of the four IEEE 802.15.4 channels, as shown
in Figure 9. In most cases, IEEE 802.15.4 is vulnerable to
interference [157], however, in certain cases, it does cause
interference [158].
In order to improve network performance and support
coexistence, these technologies inherently utilize specific
techniques that help to promote coexistence. For example,
IEEE 802.15.4 employs a number of inherent mechanisms
such as DSSS, CSMA/CA, CCA, low transmit power, low
duty cycle, channel alignment, ED, and LQI as explained in
Section III. DSSS promotes coexistence and protects against
interference by spreading the signal to a wider frequency
through chipping code. Chipping code is achieved by map-
ping the bit pattern of the signal into a higher data rate bit
sequence. As the signal is spread over a larger bandwidth,
the narrowband interferer blocks a small overall percent-
age of the signal. The receiver is able to easily recover the
signal [159]. CSMA/CA works on a ‘‘listen before talk’’
principle, where the transmitting devices PHY continuously
samples the channel and notifies the receiving device when it
is clear to transmit. In this way, it is less likely to cause colli-
sion and interference with other signals. The radio turnaround
time for IEEE 802.15.4 is 192 µs, while the turnaround time
of the DIFS (Distributed Interframe Space) of IEEE 802.11 is
50 µs. This can cause IEEE 802.11 devices to easily preempt
the channel access while the IEEE 802.15.4 device is still in
the process of radio state switching. Acknowledged transmis-
sion and retries further ensure reliability, where the receiver
acknowledges a successful data reception. If the receiver does
not send an ACK in a stipulated time, the sender assumes
failure and retransmits data by using its retry limit. This
can be particularly useful when the IEEE 802.15.4 device
is encountering interference when coexisting with Blue-
tooth. Bluetooth may interfere with the first transmission,
but then it would hop to another channel. A retry helps
the IEEE 802.15.4 device to make a successful transmis-
sion on the second attempt. However, studies in [160] show
that the timing mechanism employed in CCA mechanism of
IEEE 802.15.4 is much longer than that of IEEE 802.11 b/g,
and it causes IEEE 802.15.4 to be in an adverse situation in
terms of channel access competition.
IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH mode uses channel hopping to
promote coexistence. Every transmission happens on a dif-
ferent channel. This helps to further counter the effects
of interference from other co-located networks. Likewise,
WirelessHART utilizes channel hopping in combination with
channel blacklisting to deal with interference effectively.
With this method, a channel that is continuously causing
transmission problems is eliminated from the list of available
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channels. ISA100.11a employs adaptive frequency hopping
using slow hopping, fast hopping, and a hybrid combination
of both.
Although these techniques avoid interference to some
extent, the rising penetration of these networks in different
domains prompts the need for more advanced and sound
interference avoidance techniques in order to help these
technologies coexist constructively. Especially for mission
critical applications, the issue of interference in a coexisting
environment becomes more challenging due to the real-time
characteristics of these applications which always require
bounded latency and high throughput.
The issue of coexistence between IEEE 802.15.4 and
IEEE 802.11a/b/g has been discussed in [157], [158],
and [160]. For instance, in [160], it is shown how
severely an IEEE 802.11 network can interfere with an
IEEE 802.15.4 network and degrade its performance. This
performance degradation can lead to adverse consequences
for application QoS requirements. For example, consider a
fire detection application based on IEEE 802.15.4. If there is
a substantial packet loss due to massive IEEE 802.11 inter-
ference, the fire extinguisher may not trigger within the
set latency bounds, leading to catastrophic consequences.
Angrisani et al. [155] experimentally studied the coexis-
tence of ZigBee and WLAN. The experiment was con-
ducted by varying different characteristics, such as packet
size, packet rate, and SINR, under different topologies. The
authors confirmed that ZigBee and WLAN could coexist
but to the detriment of packet loss rate and throughput.
Guo et al. [161] conducted experimental tests to assess
the interference from an IEEE 802.11 transmitter, Blue-
tooth transmitter, and microwave ovens sources on the link
reliability of IEEE 802.15.4 devices. Through their results,
the authors show that these interference sources (ISs) cause
significant packet error rate (PER). The value of PER varies
from 2% with no IS to an upward 25% depending upon the
distance between receiver, transmitter, and IS.
B. COEXISTENCE OF BLUETOOTH WITH OTHER
WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES
After version 1.2, Bluetooth employed AFH with the pseudo-
random FH technique. As random frequency hopping suf-
fered from certain complications, such as repeating the trans-
mission in busy channels. Pust and Burda [162] performed a
comparison between the FH and AFH mathematical models
and proved that AFH has a better performance in avoiding
interference. The basic idea of AFH is to classify the channels
as good or bad channels. Nodes are only allowed to transmit
in good channels. To avoid interference, AFH restricts trans-
mission on busy channels by labeling them as bad channels.
Transmission in a good channel helps Bluetooth to estab-
lish a reliable connection and leave busy channels for other
technologies. However, the number of channels should not
be less than a specific number. Otherwise, the good chan-
nels would be more sensitive to interference. For example,
in BR/EDR, the good channels can be reduced down to only
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
20 channels [163]. In AFH the device is not aware of the other
devices and their transmission status. In order to identify the
traffic condition in a channel for classification, there are two
main methods: Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI)
and the Packet Error Rate (PER) [164]. Channel noise is
one of the factors which has an impact on signal strength.
In the RSSI technique, the receiver side measures the signal
strength and informs the transmitter about the channel con-
dition. On the other hand, in PER, the transmitter measures
channel noise based on the number of lost packets. In order
to update the channel map, the validity of classification needs
to be checked periodically. Apart from all of the benefits
of the AFH, there are also disadvantages to its use. For
instance, in order to check the channel quality over time,
AFH has to periodically scan and classify the channels, which
increases the duty cycle. Moreover, reducing the number of
available channels may cause more sensitivity to interference.
Lee and Lee [165] simulated packet delivery ratio perfor-
mance in BR/EDR by combining AFH and adaptive transmit
power. They considered an environment with IEEE 802.11b
and a number of BR/EDR piconets. They compared the pro-
posed method with the basic AFH in term of interference
mitigation in different distances. They showed that adaptively
controlling the transmit power significantly decreases the
PER. Another study in [166] analyzed the impact of inter-
ference of other sources on BLE and ZigBee. The authors
monitored the power consumption of BLE and ZigBee and
showed that BLE is more energy efficient in terms of the
number of transmitted bytes per Joule. The study presented
in [167] tested the performance of BLE. They analyzed the
probability of BLE network failure in different environments
and presence of interference. The results showed that, with
the use of AFH, BLE has a lower probability of failure even
in high interference. Bronzi et al. [168] presented the appli-
cation of BLE for robust Inter-vehicular communications.
They examined the impact of IEEE 802.11g on BLE. The
experimental results showed that BLE can be a reliable solu-
tion when compared to IEEE 802.11p if the high data rate is
not required. The performance of the advertisement channels
in BLE was analyzed in [136]. Based on the experiment,
in a dense environment, authors claimed that when multiple
devices are scanning in the same channels, it is not feasible to
increase packet size to above 31 bytes for the advertisement
channel.
C. OTHER SOURCES OF INTERFERENCE
Microwave ovens use electromagnetic waves in the 2.4 GHz
band. Although they are covered by a Faraday cage,
there is still some leakage that occurs around the doors.
These waves increase the motion in water molecules and
heat up food [169]. According to the US Department of
Energy (DOE), more than 90% of houses have microwave
ovens [170]. They also share the same spectrum and cause
interference for networking devices based on WLAN, Blue-
tooth, and IEEE 802.15.4. Microwave ovens normally gener-
ate 60 dBm signal power and operate in a different range in
VOLUME 6, 2018
2.4 GHz (model dependent). Results show that the radiation
from microwave ovens that operate in the vicinity of WSN
networks can cause up to 92% packet loss [171] in WSN.
This increases further interference for wireless networking
devices in the 2.4 GHz band. Kim et al. [160] investigated
the coexistence of WLAN and ZigBee networks in the pres-
ence of microwave ovens. The experimental results show
that the microwave oven is a dominant interferer and it
significantly increases ZigBee’s PER. Rondeau et al. [172]
analyzed the characteristics of microwave ovens and their
effect on BR/EDR. The experimental results show that the
AFH mechanism enables BR/EDR to be able to tolerate a
high level of interference at a distance of one meter.
Cordless phones are available almost everywhere. Most of
them operate in the 2.4 GHz band like microwave ovens. They
use DSSS or FHSS to overcome interference and achieve
better voice quality. Generally, the DSSS method changes
the channel manually, while the FHSS method automatically
changes the channel. Similar to microwave ovens, the fre-
quency range and the technique used in these devices are
model dependent, and there is no global standard for them.
VI. Z-WAVE
Z-wave is a low-power wireless technology that is specifi-
cally designed for control applications in residential areas.
It supports full mesh networking. The technology was devel-
oped by Zensys, which is a company for home automation
applications such as Heating, Ventilation, and Air Condi-
tioning (HVAC), Smart Lighting Control (SLC) and access
control [173]. The main feature of the Z-wave technology
is that it operates in the sub-1 GHz band, which allows the
signal to avoid any interference with the 2.4 GHz working
technologies. Moreover, it has the advantage of full interoper-
ability with other z-wave enabled devices compared to other
wireless technologies. This means regardless of product type,
brand and manufacturer all Z-wave devices are able to join
one network and help grow the mesh network. For example,
a BLE enabled thermostat from one company might not con-
nect to BLE smart sensor with other brand but in the Z-wave
network, all the devices are cooperating with one another. The
standard is proprietary and is available under a non-disclosure
agreement. The point-to-point communication range between
nodes is about 30 meters.
The PHY layer in Z-wave is designed for remote control
applications, where most of their requirements are just a
single end-to-end message. For example, turning on and off a
light requires a very low data rate. The technology operates in
the 908.42 MHz band in the US and the 868.42 MHz band in
Europe, employing the Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) modu-
lation. By operating in this band, Z-wave avoids collision in
2.4 GHz frequency band. The radio has a data rate of up to
40 kbit/s [174].
In the MAC layer, Z-wave uses the CSMA/CA. The re-
transmission technique is based on ACKs. There are two
types of Z-wave devices: controller and slaves. The controller
has the responsibility of initiating the control commands and
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sending them to other nodes. On the other hand, slave nodes
are responsible for replying and executing the commands. It is
also possible for the slave to forward the command to other
nodes. A Z-wave network can support 232 nodes, including
multiple controllers [175]. The controller node, which creates
the Z-wave network, becomes the primary controller. There
is only one central controller in a Z-wave network. The other
controllers are the secondary controllers. Controllers can
communicate with all the slaves. However, just the primary
controller can add and remove the nodes from the network.
Aside from the controller, there are some slave nodes in a
Z-wave network that are only responsible for performing an
action or routing the controller’s messages.
VII. 802.11AH
WLAN is a worldwide available technology. However, this
technology suffers from a limited range and high power con-
sumption, which are key elements in IoT. In October 2013,
IEEE P802.11-TASK GROUP AH [176] provided the stan-
dard specification over WLAN to overcome these limitations.
In the specification, MAC and PHY are inherited from IEEE
802.11ac. Additionally, sub-1 GHz frequency operation is
added to provide better coverage, obstacle penetration, and
lower power consumption. As explained in Section V, most
of the wireless technologies opt for operating in the unli-
censed 2.4 GHz band. This makes the frequency band more
and more crowded. Operating in sub-1 GHz is an advantage
for IEEE 802.11ah to avoid interferes in the 2.4 GHz fre-
quency band. On the other hand, while technologies such as
Bluetooth and ZigBee are targeting WPAN, IEEE 802.11ah
aims for up to 1 km coverage to be used for applications
in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). Adaptation
of IEEE 802.11ah in smart homes, wearables, agriculture
monitoring, animal tracking, industrial automation, and smart
cities eliminates many existing wireless communication limi-
tations. For example, a smartwatch can directly communicate
with an IEEE 802.11ah Access Point (AP) to transmit the
information without needing to connect to a smartphone, or a
single AP in a smart building can manage all the connected
devices.
A. PHY LAYER
As discussed above, IEEE 802.11ah, like IEEE 802.11ac,
employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM) modulation in order to achieve high through-
put and more extended coverage among low-power wire-
less networks. The difference between IEEE 802.11ac and
IEEE 802.11ah is that the channel widths are ten times
clocked down. Instead of 20, 40, 80, and 160 MHz in
IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11ah uses 2, 4, 8, and 16 MHz in
addition to an extra 1 MHz channel to extend the range. The
1 MHz and 2 MHz bandwidths are intended for applications
that require low data rates and power, such as WSN. Further-
more, a new modulation and coding scheme, MCS10, has
been designed for the 1 MHz channel. MCS10 is more reli-
able than the other modulation and coding schemes, and it can
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TABLE 5. Worldwide availability of IEEE 802.11ah frequency range [177].
provide a coverage range up to 1 km. However, employing all
the channels in different regions is not possible because of
the licensing limitations. Table 5 shows the global available
unlicensed bands in sub-1 GHz with Emitted Radiated Power
(ERP) and Channel Bandwidth (CBW) [178].
B. MAC LAYER
The IEEE 802.11ah MAC layer is designed to support scal-
ability while keeping the power consumption low. Theoret-
ically, the standard is able to support up to 6000 nodes.
In order to support this amount of connected nodes to a
single AP, IEEE 802.11ah uses the Restricted Access Window
(RAW) mechanism. An AP defines RAW by first grouping
the clients. The RAW is a time slot assigned to a group and
the AP. The group is only allowed to communicate in that
specified time slot window. In each group, nodes are compet-
ing for channel access. Up to 64 slots are supported [179].
In addition, IEEE 802.11ah introduced Target Wake Time
(TWT) to save power. TWT assigns access time to the clients
that need to wake up and access the channel. Clients and the
AP exchange information about the channel access time and
connection duration.
VIII. LoRa
LoRa is a radio frequency transmission method for wide
area network applications. It was developed by Cycleo of
Grenoble and acquired by Semtech [180]. It is a low-power
and low data rate technology that covers up to 10 kilometers
for wireless communication. It operates in the sub-1 GHz
spectrum and follows the previously mentioned unlicensed
band for every region in the world (see Table 5). The fre-
quency band is divided into 8 or 15 channels, depending
on the operation region. The transmission power is limited
from 2 to 14 dBm in Europe and from 5 to 20 dBm in
the U.S. LoRa has three bandwidth classes for communica-
tion: 125, 250, and 500 KHz. Although high bandwidth has
the advantage of high data rate, it consumes more energy,
reduces the communication range, and increases the possibil-
ity of interference due to operating in the broader spectrum.
In LoRa, modulation is based on spread-spectrum techniques
and a variation of Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS). In par-
ticular, it has the spreading factor (SF) of 7 to 12, which
represents the number of bits encoded per symbol. The larger
SF increases the transmission range in the expanse of higher
power consumption. The CSS does not distinguish the noise
in the channel like DSSS or AFH, but it has the advantage
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
of using the entire allocated bandwidth, making it resistant
to channel noise, Doppler effect, and multi-path fading. Nor-
mally, FSK modulations can only detect signals that are 8 to
10 dB above the noise floor, however, using CSS features
enables the LoRa to detect signals that are 19.5 dB below the
noise floor. Together with CSS LoRa uses FEC for error cor-
rection with the code rate of 4/5, 4/6, 4/7, and 4/8 to increase
the robustness of the channel. More redundancy bits for error
correction helps to extend the range and robustness of the
link by recovering the corrupted bits that are caused by path
loss or interference. However, the overhead consumes more
energy. The LoRa network architecture uses the star-of-stars
topology, which consists of end nodes and gateways. End
nodes are usually battery powered devices and act as slave
devices, while gateways are potent devices that are connected
to AC power source and are responsible for collecting the data
from the end nodes. In the LoRa network, several gateways
can receive the information that is transmitted by the end
node, and multiple receptions increase the reliability of the
network.
Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a layer
on top of the LoRa that defines roles for communication
introduced by the LoRa Alliance [181]. It is one of the most
adopted, low-power wireless technologies for low data rate
and long-range connectivity. It has advantages over cellular
technologies, since cellular technologies are battery hungry
and not suitable for low-power applications. For example,
a soil moisture sensor in agricultural monitoring needs to
sense the humidity level every few days, and the battery has
to last for a few years. LoRaWAN extended the network
functionality by adding a network server and defining differ-
ent device classes for each application. The network server
is responsible for managing the communication, filtering
the multiple copies from one packet received by different
gateways and scheduling the communication. For example,
the network server decides the gateway that should commu-
nicate with certain end nodes and when to change the data
rate. LoRaWAN has a bidirectional-employing adaptive data
rate and transmission power. This adaptive control optimizes
the power consumption and performance of the network. As
presented in Figure 17 LoRaWAN has three device classes
that are specified for each application.
• Class A is the default class and uses pure ALOHA to
access the link for transmission. In this class, the end
node wakes up periodically and transmits a packet.
Then, it waits for the downlink to respond in the same
channel and the same SF. If it does not receive the packet,
it waits for the second packet in a different frequency and
with different SF. After receiving a response from the
gateway, the end node switches to sleep mode. On the
gateway side, the device is only able to transmit infor-
mation once, exactly after receiving the packet from the
end node. Therefore, if the gateway needs to send more
than one packet, it has to wait for hours or days to send
the next packet in the queue. This class has the advantage
of having the lowest power consumption due to the
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FIGURE 17. LoRaWAN communication classes.
extended sleep period. Meanwhile, it is not suitable for
real-time applications. This class is mostly used for non-
critical sensors with long battery life requirements.
• Class B is designed for applications with more frequent
connectivity requirements compared to class A. This
class is a combination of class A and C. Devices in this
class wake up whenever the gateways have information
to transmit. A beacon that is transmitted by the gateway
schedules the wake-up time for the end node. Frequent
access ensures the connection establishment when it
is required, however, the overhead due to the beacons
and the frequent wake-up time reduces the battery life.
Valves for irrigation are one of the examples of uses
cases for devices in this class.
• Class C is normally implemented in devices that are
connected to an AC power source, where energy con-
sumption is not a concern. In this class, devices are
continuously listening to the channel, except when they
are transmitting information. Therefore, they are ideal
for real-time applications. Devices such as street lights
that are connected to the AC power are an example of
this class and can act as gateways as well.
IX. APPLICATIONS
In this section, we present an overview of the important
IoT applications in the home, healthcare, industry, and city
domain. These applications utilize different wireless tech-
nologies and standards. First, we summarize the requirements
of each application and their traffic characteristics. Second,
we discuss the suitability of each wireless standard pertaining
to each type of application. We critically point out the stan-
dards that are suitable for each application category. Addi-
tionally, we identify the drawbacks of each standard based
on the requirements of the applications.
A. SMART BUILDING
The basic goal of a smart building is to provide a better
living environment in order to make our life more comfortable
and more efficient while also making it safer and pleasant.
It is reported that we spend more than 87% of our time
in indoor environments, including home and commercial
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buildings [182]. In 2016, the global market for smart homes

was valued at $39.93 billion and predicted to reach up to
$79.57 billion by 2022 with a Compound Annual Growth
Rate (CAGR) of 11.3% [183].
However, the concept of the smart building is not only
about controlling lights or other devices with voice com-
mands or a simple point to point remote control. The
main idea is to have an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) using
M2M communication in order for a device in the building
to make smart decisions based on real-time conditions [184].
According to Gartner, a typical family home will have
500 smart devices by 2022 [185]. This future requires a scal- FIGURE 18. Comparison of major wireless technology demands for smart
home predicted by 2018 (The CAGR is from 2016 to 2021) (source: [186]).
able wireless technology. As we discussed in Section V, with
the increasing number of smart objects that communicate
with each other using the same frequency band, interference TABLE 6. Smart building requirements and available technologies.
becomes a severe issue.
Furthermore, issues related to Internet connectivity, mobil-
ity, availability, energy consumption, and reliability need to
be addressed. There are many consumer-oriented IoT smart
home applications. Some of the major use cases and their
communication requirements are discussed below.
One of the common use cases in buildings is
Smart Lighting Control (SLC) that provides more comfort
and convenience for the owners and has a direct impact
on saving cost and energy. The Gartner’s report estimated
that SLC cloud reduce the energy cost by 90%, and its
market will grow from 46 million units in 2015 to 2.54 billion
units in 2020 [187]. SLCs are performed by employing
relays, motion sensors, daylight sensors, timers, dimmers, but they also have direct impacts on people’s well-being.
and switches. In order to perform efficient wireless control- Smart controlling of HVAC requires employing smart ther-
ling for this hardware, it requires mobility and scalability. mostats, control valves, heating and cooling coils, dampers,
For example, a large number of lamps or LEDs may exist and actuators, pumps, fans, and vents. In order to access HVAC
need to be accessible from different locations of the building. from anywhere, the timers, sensors, and actuators are required
The mesh networking capability can support these to increase to be connected to the Internet and support scalability.
the coverage. A person who is moving in the building must Interoperability is desirable among sensors and actuators
be able to access the lights. from different vendors in order to collaboratively communi-
Another key use case is the privacy and safety of the cate to make decisions. For example, a central heating or cool-
buildings. A typical solution for providing safety in buildings ing system must be able to collect information about window
is the use of video surveillance. However, many users are shades, humidity, temperature, or absence of residents.
reluctant to surveillance cameras because of privacy con- Entertainment is one of the more compelling applications
cerns, installation costs, lack of real-time responses, power in smart buildings and homes that covers the access of mul-
consumption issues, and massive storage requirements. timedia contents such as music and home theaters. These
A better alternative to video surveillance is to use low- applications require high throughput for streaming audio and
cost and low-power sensors that are able to detect and per- video contents on the go. Since these devices rely on batteries,
form actions immediately and prevent disasters. For example, they require low-power consumption.
in the case of a fire in the building, smoke detectors can Figure 18 shows the forecasting provided by ABI research
reliably prevent hazardous situations in a promptly manner. for the future of wireless technologies in smart homes [190].
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, The numbers prove that technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth
Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) is the dual mode will have less share of the market, and low-
largest contributor to the energy bills in a home. It contributes power and low rate devices will be more desired. Table 6
to 48% of the total energy consumption of U.S. homes [188]. summarizes the general requirements and shows the major
In many cases, the cost of power consumption changes based technologies that support these requirements in smart build-
on the operation hours. Consequently, load balance control- ings. A detailed discussion about smart building requirements
ling systems can help in scheduling the operation during off- is presented in [191].
peak periods [189]. The benefits of using smart HVAC are not BR/EDR and BLE are available technologies in almost
only limited to providing comfort and a pleasant environment, every smartphone, laptop, and tablet. This feature enables

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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
smart buildings to be controlled using these devices. Statis-
tics show that nearly 73% of people would like to receive
smartphone alerts from their home security system [192].
Compared to other low-power technologies, this availabil-
ity along with lower-power consumption are advantages for
BLE. As shown in Figure 18, it can be predicted that the
BLE market will surpass other technologies. BLE’s AFH
algorithm and usage of advertising channels have reduced
interference with most of the common operating wireless
technologies in the 2.4 GHz band, such as IEEE 802.11.
This feature makes BLE a suitable option for an environ-
ment that is full of wireless devices that operate in that
band. The aforementioned features also help to reduce battery
consumption and provide reliability. By increasing the range
up to four times more in Bluetooth 5, the signals can cover
an entire building. For example, the user is able to access
the door lock from anywhere in the building. Another advan-
tage of BLE is the recently added mesh networking feature,
which increases the network scale, reliability, and coverage.
Countless amounts of research has been done on Bluetooth
applications in smart buildings [193]–[196]. For example,
Putra et al. [197] compared the energy consumption of
WiFi and BLE devices in smart home applications. The
result showed the possibility of occupancy data transmission
via BLE with 30% less battery consumption. Aside from
academic publications on the application of BLE in smart
buildings, there are some companies such as UniKey [198],
BOLT [199], and Emerson [200] that are working on home
automation devices based on Bluetooth. Beaconing is one of
the unique features of BLE that is used in many applications,
such as indoor positioning. For example, by tracking the users
inside the building, the AmI can perform desired actions
like turning on or off the lights or playing one’s favorite
music [201]. As shown in the Figure 18, the Bluetooth bea-
con market will have the highest market compared to other
Bluetooth-enabled technologies in 2021. While Bluetooth
has its benefits, it does have some limitations that are asso-
ciated with it. For example, there is a lack of scalability
support in BR/EDR and IPv6 connectivity in both BLE and
BR/EDR [202]. Incorporating other technologies with Blue-
tooth will increase the demand.
ZigBee is another candidate for smart home applications.
One of the major advantages of ZigBee is that as an open
global wireless standard, it provides the open source software
stack for developers to freely access the network and appli-
cation layer. It employees mesh networking to eliminate the
single point of failure and expand the reach of the network.
Additionally, in the star topology in WLAN, sharing a single
node between a large numbers of connected devices has the
problem of increasing the delay in the entire network. The
ZigBee network supports more than 400 connected nodes,
which will be necessary for the future of smart homes, based
on the Gartner report’s prediction. With mesh networking
increasing the number of the devices, the robustness of the
network is also increasing due to redundancy and decentral-
ization [204]. A self-organizing network is optimal for a more
VOLUME 6, 2018
scalable network architecture that incorporates reliability and
adaptivity. ZigBee enables a variety of smart home applica-
tions by connecting the sensors and actuators. Additionally,
ZigBee is a low-power wireless standard that allows the
battery to operate for several years. It can also run without a
battery by utilizing harvested energy. For example, a keychain
flashlight gets its power by a simple push of a button.
Internet connectivity is one of the significant characteris-
tics of an ideal wireless network for home automation appli-
cations. Although ZigBee natively does not support Internet
connectivity in the protocol stack, the 6LoWPAN technology
adopted the IPv6 connectivity based on the 802.15.4 stan-
dard [47]. This adoption allows the nodes to be independent
of the translation gateway in order to access the Internet.
Compared to Bluetooth, the main limitations of ZigBee-
based smart buildings are the lack of support by smartphones
and the low communication throughput. Similar to Bluetooth,
there is an ample amount of research that has been done on
the application of ZigBee in smart buildings [205] [206].
Zigbee also has products on the market that are used
for smart building applications. Companies such as Con-
trol4 [207] and Phillips Hue [208] are designing their prod-
ucts based on ZigBee technology.
Thread is a recently developed wireless technology tar-
geted for home automation. It is IPv6 enabled and sup-
ports mesh networking, thereby all devices can be addressed
locally or globally. Mesh networking support allows the
network to cover the entire building, and it improves the
robustness of the network and avoids issues such as single
point of failure. SLC is one of the main applications of a
Thread network, and scalability is one of the requirements
for the SLC applications. A Thread network supports up to
200 connected nodes. In addition, operating on MAC and
PHY layers of IEEE 802.15.4 allows the technology to get
the benefit of low-power consumption.
In addition to Bluetooth and ZigBee, several proprietary
standards target building automation applications. Standards
such as Z-wave [209], INSTEON [210], and EnOcean are
particularly designed to meet the requirements in home
automation applications. Z-Wave specifically targets control
applications such as SLC and access control. A thermostat
is one of the examples of these applications and has over
2100 certified products. The products are supported by 600
companies like Intermatic [211], Hawking Technology [212],
Wink [213], and Aeotec [214]. As previously mentioned in
Section VI, Z-wave has the advantage of using the sub-
1 GHz frequency band. However, this can also be a disad-
vantage when the products need to be distributed globally
and used in other countries that have different rules for
operating in the sub-1 GHz band. INSTEON Alliance was
launched in 2005 by Smartlabs company [215]. The tech-
nology combined powerline and wireless mesh technology.
Devices can support wireless technologies, wired technolo-
gies, or both. Wireless devices use FSK modulation and
operate at 904 MHz with a data rate of 38.4 kb/s [216], [217].
INSTEON has applications in SLC, thermostats, smart
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FIGURE 19. Comparison of major Bluetooth applications market predicted by 2021 (source: [203]).
sensors, and remote controls. EnOcean [218] is a wireless
technology developed for smart homes and standardized by
the international standard ISO/IEC 14543-3-10 [219]. It aims
to use harvested power sources from the environment for
wireless technology [220]. Devices such as smart plugs, SLC,
and HVAC can be controlled by EnOcean. Like Z-wave and
INSTEON, it operates in the sub-1 GHz band with a data rate
of up to 125 kbps.
B. SMART HEALTHCARE
Improving the health quality for individuals prompts a need
to provide advanced systems for diagnosing, treating, and
preventing diseases. A robust healthcare system can be
divided into two generally classified categories: prevention
of illness and post illness monitoring. Monitoring the blood
pressure, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Electroencephalogram
(EEG), Electromyogram (EMG), glucose level, cholesterol
level, pulse oximetry, and toxins in the body can help early-
stage detection in order to prevent fatal diseases, such as can-
cer or heart attacks [221]. The rapidly increasing population
and longer life expectancies raise the importance of mech-
anisms for children and elderly health monitoring, artificial
organ implementation and drug delivery. According to the
World Health Organization (WHO), global life expectancy
increased from 66.4 years in 2000 to 71.4 years in 2015 [222].
As the global life expectancy is increasing, the size of the
geriatric population is also increasing. The number of people
over 60 years old increased from 607 million to 901 million
by a 48% increase. Also, it is predicted that by 2030, this num-
ber will grow by 56% to 1.4 billion and reach to 2.1 billion
in 2050 [223]. It is also clear that the risk of chronic diseases
like neurological conditions, diabetes, heart diseases, and
strokes increase with age. The other concern is the cost of
healthcare, which can include hospitalization, home nursing,
and medicines. It is estimated that in the U.S., healthcare
expenses are more than $2 trillion annually [224]. This leads
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to the need to provide an advanced healthcare system for diag-
nosing, treating, and preventing disease. The desired system
must be inexpensive, accessible, harmless, reliable, and must
not restrict the daily activities, mobility, or quality of life.
IoT, in combination with medical engineering, has the
great potential to provide this system through wirelessly
monitoring and recording medical data. Providing the Inter-
net connectivity allows the physician to monitor the health
condition of the patients. Thus, 41% of the IoT is marketed
for healthcare applications by 2025 [228]. There are a large
number of researchers who are focusing on the cure, preven-
tion, and prediction of diseases using IoT and wireless tech-
nologies [229]–[232]. In IoT-based healthcare systems, smart
homes can replace hospitals, and bulky, attached-to-the-body
monitoring systems can be changed to tiny, implanted sen-
sors. Table 7 shows the QoS requirements for a wireless
network, including the data rate, timeliness, acceptable error
rate, and required battery life.
It is important to provide a platform that does not limit the
normal activities and quality of life of patients. For example,
bulky attached sensors that are connected to wires are hard
to carry and restrict the mobility of a patient [25]. Besides,
providing Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is important in
monitoring health conditions. Smart homes or smart hospi-
tals are examples of AAL. For instance, a smart home can
receive the information from the wearable sensors of the
patient in order to manage the temperature. Wireless sensors
can be placed inside or outside of the body as wearables.
These sensors can detect changes faster than highly equipped
laboratories, especially for people who have a history of
cancer or other diseases which can be inherited. However,
this constant monitoring leads to high battery consumption.
This increases the risk of nonavailability of these sensors
in critical moments. Latency in bio-medical sensor applica-
tions is soft real time. Normally, in critical scenarios such
as during a heart attack, a few seconds of latency is still
acceptable.
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TABLE 7. QoS requirements for smart healthcare (sources: [225]–[227]).
In [233], they implemented real-time and low-power ECG
and EEG Bluetooth based sensors. They introduced the com-
pressed sensing method, which saves the battery up to 37.1%
more. In [234], the feasibility of applying dual mode Blue-
tooth in vital monitoring was analyzed. Authors implemented
the ARM CPU based sensors, such as ECG, body temper-
ature, and motion sensors. Reference [235] reviewed the
available commercial Bluetooth-based healthcare devices in
the market, which are composed of sensors such as activ-
ity tracking, ECG, EEG, EMG, and glucose monitoring.
A BLE-based ECG monitoring using a smartphone is imple-
mented in [236], and the result shows that power consump-
tion is highly reduced. In addition to reducing power con-
sumption, an equally important aspect of using sensors is
that the patient is being continuously monitored in both
indoor and outdoor locations like their home, hospital, and
outside. Elderly patients are penitent when they feel that
they are in danger and need to be continuously monitored.
Reference [237] proposed a BLE-based indoor positioning
system for patients who have Alzheimer.
There are several commercial products like wearable
devices on the market. Jawbone [238], Apple Watch [239],
Samsung Gear [240] and most of the smartwatches are using
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technology to send the health sensor
information. Heart rate monitoring with ECG, activity track-
ing, sleep monitoring, and other forms of health data are
implemented in these wearables.
However, Bluetooth is not the only low-power wireless
technology for healthcare applications. ZigBee and 6LoW-
PAN are other candidates in this area. In [241] and [242],
ZigBee-based ECG and pulse oximetry sensors are imple-
mented by the authors, and the results showed that ZigBee
meets the QoS requirements for these healthcare applications.
Coexistence is also important in healthcare applications due
to the WiFi-enabled smartphones that are operating close to
the wireless technologies such as ZigBee. In [243], the impact
of WiFi near the ZigBee wearables has been analyzed.
Although 6LoWPAN and ZigBee share the same PHY
and MAC, the IPv6 capability of 6LoWPAN makes the
devices addressable via the Internet. This allows for the
opportunity to remotely monitor health conditions or keep
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health records in the cloud. 6LoWPAN-based real-time health
monitoring is proposed in [244]. They tested the performance
of ECG monitoring sensor data for remote healthcare using
a 6LoWPAN edge router. Doukas and Maglogiannis [245]
presented the cloud platform in which sensors are connected
to the Internet using 6LoWPAN technology.
C. INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION
During the last decade, wireless technology has been increas-
ingly utilized in industries, leading to the Industrial Internet
of Things (IIoT), where Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
(IWSNs) play a central role of behaving like a digital skin for
the IoT. IWSNs can monitor critical parameters and control
industrial processes and then inform the industrial personnel
of this information promptly. IWSNs offer flexibility, self-
organization, rapid deployment, and low-cost. They have
the ability to make processes autonomous, resulting in the
minimal human intervention [246] when compared to their
wired counterpart. The shift from wired to the wireless net-
works dramatically helps to reduce huge capital expenditures
of installation and maintenance of wires. Moreover, wired
networks are rigid and fixed in nature. This makes it difficult
to adapt to changes in industrial environments. In addition,
certain industrial applications require mobile robots, which
becomes a huge challenge with wired networks. However,
wireless networks can easily support such mobility scenar-
ios. Although IoT seems to revolutionize the industries, it is
only if it satisfies the strict requirements and challenges
that are put in place by the industrial applications. Such
challenges include: extremely high reliability, low latency,
robustness, fault tolerance, massive scalability, interoperabil-
ity, and energy efficiency. Reliability against interference is
highly indispensable because industries encompass several
wireless networks, heavy machinery, and co-located com-
munication systems that can interfere with IWSNs [246].
This can negatively impact wireless connectivity and result
in link unreliability issues. Besides, most low-power wireless
standards operate in the ISM band which can make them
highly vulnerable to interference. Certain applications in
industries, such as closed-loop control systems are extremely
delaying sensitive. They tend to require low latency so that the
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TABLE 8. Different classes of industrial applications as defined by ISA.
control system can function smoothly. Furthermore, low
power IWSNs have limited battery resources. When the
devices run out of battery life and die, it leads to network
failures. Therefore, the network needs to be fault tolerant
so that failure of one device or a group of devices does not
cause the entire network to fail. Scalability is also a chal-
lenge with wireless networks. The industries require dense
networks that consist of hundreds and thousands of nodes.
Efficient and fair distribution of limited resources in such
dense networks causes trade-off complexities for several per-
formance metrics. As time passes, certain devices and func-
tionalities are removed, and new ones may be added. This
requires the network to be scalable enough to accommodate
such changes without compromising performance. Currently,
wired networks are already prevalent in industries and used
to support many processes and operations. The use of new
wireless standards and solutions should seamlessly work with
the legacy systems. This requires interoperability among the
standards and solutions.
Table 8 shows the different classes of industrial applica-
tions, ranging from process monitoring, control, safety, and
emergency operations as defined by ISA [37]. The traffic
categories are listed according to traffic priority with 0 as
the highest priority traffic and 5 as the lowest priority traffic.
Each application category generates a different kind of data
traffic. In comparison to user-generated traffic on the Internet,
the traffic generated by the industrial applications has differ-
ent characteristics.
Most of the processes in industries are periodic in nature,
meaning that they do not require frequent data transmission.
The long idle periods in between data transmission makes
lower power networks more suitable in comparison to tradi-
tional cellular or next generation wireless networks.
Essentially, the industrial environment is heterogeneous
as shown in Table 9, i.e., certain traffic is an extremely
high priority, while the other requires less priority. The high
priority traffic requires immediate response to certain events,
i.e., they need the right response at the right time, other-
wise, the system can run into catastrophic situations. Below,
we discuss some of the well-known low power standards
and technologies developed over the years that promise to
fulfill the requirements of industrial automation and help to
realize IIoT.
67918
1) ZIGBEE
ZigBee offers low power consumption. It supports several
topologies that make it suitable for industrial monitoring and
control. However, it is unable to provide high reliability and
robustness [248].
ZigBee does not employ any frequency-agility protection
against interference and fading effects. Moreover, the static
nature of the channel will create a bottleneck for ZigBee com-
munication if other wireless LANs operate in close proximity.
This also impacts the delay and energy consumption because
frequent packet losses will cause retransmissions, which will
lead to an increase in delay and energy consumption. Zig-
Bee uses IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, which renders the delay to
be unbounded (cf Section III-C). This causes problems for
real-time transmission, especially for control applications in
process automation.
2) WIRELESSHART
WirelessHART is developed to cater to monitoring and con-
trol in industries. It improves upon the drawbacks of ZigBee.
The standard is robust and provides secure communication by
implementing features such as channel hopping and channel
blacklisting in order to avoid interference. In the case of
transmission failures, retransmission occurs on a different
channel. This improves reliability in harsh industrial environ-
ments. It supports mesh networking together with graph rout-
ing, which offers path redundancy and self-healing features
that help in case of broken links [248]. The MAC protocol
works on TDMA and provides multiple features, as discussed
in Section 7.
The standard employs a dedicated security manager, which
implements the necessary encryption and security policies.
Although WirelessHART is suitable in many aspects com-
pared to ZigBee, it lacks public key encryption and the ability
to connect to other networks without a gateway [249].
3) IEEE 802.15.4E
IEEE 802.15.4e defines six MAC modes. In particular, its
TSCH MAC mode is important because it implements a
deterministic TDMA mechanism and has channel hopping
features in order to avoid the inevitable interference. The
MAC protocol is multi-channel and offers many improve-
ments as discussed in Section III-E3. Although TSCH offers
high reliability for industrial automation, it lacks a schedul-
ing entity to compute the schedule of nodes based on the
traffic requirements of the application. TSCH defines the
schedule, but how the schedule is built and maintained is
unknown.
Furthermore, 6TiSCH and 6LoWPAN standards emerged
in order to provide an IP network that is capable of enabling
low-power wireless standards as discussed in Section III-
G and Section III-H, respectively. In this way, they pro-
mote interoperability among the latest and the traditional
IP networks.
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A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
TABLE 9. Industrial applications and their typical requirements (source: [18], [247]).
FIGURE 20. Comparison of major applications based on the number of
connected devices in smart cites (source: [250]).
D. SMART CITY
The concept of a smart city envisions a city where information
and communication technologies offer viable solutions to
collect, analyze, and smartly distributes information in order
to transform the services offered to the citizens, enhance
operational efficiency, and help the public administration
make better decisions [251], [252]. One of the promising
projects for a smart city is the Smart Santander Project [50],
conducted in the Spanish port city, Santander. It proposes
a smart city where sensors, actuators, cameras, and screens
are deployed around the city to help citizens better utilize
information [253]. The smart city promises to manage and
optimize the plethora of public services, such as monitoring
structural health, air quality and noise, as well as traffic
management, smart parking, managing city energy consump-
tion, waste management, smart lighting, and the automa-
tion of public buildings [254]. This vision can be realized
by utilizing the telecommunication infrastructure, as well
as several technologies like as WSN, M2M, and Vehicular
to Vehicular (V2V) communication. A smart city integrates
several emerging technologies with existing information and
communication infrastructure in order to exhibit the suc-
cessful evolution of IoT. The environment is heterogeneous,
i.e., it encompasses different types of devices and generates
different types of data traffic. Such an environment vastly
VOLUME 6, 2018
depends on the networking connectivity, which demands
high reliability, availability, low latency, and, at the same
time, satisfies the requirements of all levels of applications.
The major barrier is the interoperability among the several
heterogeneous technologies to be able to work together to
achieve a common goal. In such a scenario, providing reliable
connectivity is a huge challenge not only because of the
coexistence of a large number of devices that comply with
different technologies but also because these devices can
face severe interference. In such scenarios, impaired network
connectivity can result in catastrophic situations for the wide
variety of offered services and applications.
In looking at the requirements that are defined by the
smart cities, low-power standards, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth,
IEEE 802.11ah, NFC, and Z-Wave, can fulfill their demands,
but they are unable to provide high throughput and extended
transmission range [255]. Furthermore, the advanced tech-
nologies, such as 3GPP, WiMAX, LTE, and LTE-Advanced,
are not suitable due to their high power consumption because
most of the smart city applications require small sensors that
will be deployed everywhere and run on batteries. In order to
realize the smart city concepts, low-power standards have to
promote interoperability. A massive number of devices will
be installed and need to work together efficiently, so scalable
protocols are necessary.
X. RELATED SURVEYS
There exist various survey papers that discuss the char-
acteristics, technologies, standards, and applications of
IoT [21], [256]–[259]. Unfortunately, these studies did not
cover the recent wireless technologies and their suitability for
each IoT application. In particular, a comprehensive study
on MAC and PHY layers in these technologies is missing.
A recent study in [257] focuses on exploring the network
architectures of IoT. The authors discuss the classification
of IoT architectures and outline future architectural require-
ments. However, the paper does not cover aspects such
as low-power standardization or well-known infrastructure
protocols for IoT. Another survey in [21] provides an
67919
 A. Nikoukar et al.: Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications
excellent, holistic discussion of IoT with respect to its archi-
tecture, common standards, elements, technologies, infras-
tructure protocols, applications, and market opportunities.
It is more of a general overview of the various aspects
of IoT, however, it does not cover the in-depth technical
details, pitfalls, and limitations of MAC protocols of low-
power standards. The survey paper in [258] provides a sound
analysis of recent advances in IoT. The authors focus the
paper on the standardized protocol stack and examine the
IETF standardization efforts and protocols. The paper pro-
vides a profound, technical discussion on the application,
MAC, routing and transport layers, as well as low-power
radio characteristics. However, it does not cover their appli-
cability and limitations in different IoT application domains.
The IoT survey paper in [256] examines the IETF current
standards and protocols and explores open questions, limita-
tions, opportunities, and future challenges. However, it dis-
cusses only the defacto standards. Besides, some surveys
focus on a single IoT application and its requirements as
well as the suitability of each wireless technology for it. For
example, Yuehong et al. [229] explored the application of IoT
in health care. The study provides a general overview of a
system architecture for IoT-based smart health care. It is a
general overview, and the specific requirements for applica-
tions are not mentioned. Similarly, Domingo [260] studied
the research trend to improve the quality of life for individuals
with disabilities. The study shows the possible solutions to
overcome the limitations of some disabilities by using con-
nected sensors and positioning technologies. The adaptability
of optimal wireless technology for each scenario has been
reviewed as well. The study lacks a larger pool of individuals
and ignores the challenge of providing a low-power network.
In [261] WBANs for medical and non-medical applications
have been reviewed. The authors explained the uniqueness
of this network because of the high mobility and placement
of some sensors inside the human body. The scope of this
is limited to the WBANs, and challenges, such as the coex-
istence of the wireless network, have not been taken into
consideration.
As was mentioned earlier, smart homes are another poten-
tial application of IoT. Alaa et al. [262] reviewed the research
trend focusing on IoT-based smart homes. The study helps
researchers to find out the challenges and demands of the
desired smart homes. However, the study only classifies the
number of researchers and directions and does not explain the
technical specifications.
The study in [204] only focuses on home automation.
Raza et al. [263] reviewed the LPWAN for long-range
communication networks such as SigFox and LoRaWAN.
They explained the available technologies of these networks
and applications. Due to the operation of LPWAN in the sub-
1 GHz frequency and the requirement of having a different
unlicensed band for every country, these technologies are not
able to operate globally.
In contrast with single application surveys, some
other reviews only explain a single wireless technology.
67920
For instance, Gomez et al. [107] and Darroudi and
Gomez [264] review the BLE standard from a protocol stack
point of view and research to provide a BLE mesh network,
respectively. On the other hand, surveys like [67], [265],
and [266] only focus on IEEE 802.15.4 based standards.
Blanckenstein et al. [267] reviewed low-power transceivers
and suitability for each application. However, due to the
novelty of technologies like BLE 5, they did not cover the
latest transceivers. Additionally, the survey only reviews the
hardware requirements for low-power networks.
XI. CONCLUSION
Emerging IoT applications impose several constraints in
terms of reliability, timeliness, scalability, and energy effi-
ciency. The purpose of our study was to provide a thor-
ough discussion about existing low-power wireless standards,
technologies, and protocols, and examine their suitability in
diverse IoT application domains. We presented the require-
ments of different applications such as smart healthcare,
industrial automation, and smart cities, and analyzed the
potentials of existing standards in meeting such requirements.
Our survey focused on the PHY and MAC layers because
they directly influence the aforementioned constraints. In our
attempt to explore their suitability, we highlighted several
drawbacks of the MAC protocols. We also discussed the
interference issue among the coexisting, low-power wireless
networks, which is a major challenge that degrades the net-
work performance for reliability and latency. We analyzed
how the inherent schemes employed by the standards cope
with the interference issues.
Lastly, we presented the application domains of the IoT and
the requirements for each scenario. Additionally, we intro-
duced the optimal wireless solution for each application
based on the demands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
(Ali Nikoukar and Saleem Raza contributed equally to this
work.)
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ALI NIKOUKAR received the master’s degree
in computer science from University Technol-
ogy Malaysia in 2014. He is currently pursu-
ing the Ph.D. degree with the Communication
and Networked Systems Research Group, Otto
von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg,
Germany (awarded by DAAD scholarship). His
research area mainly focuses on low-power wire-
less networks, in particular, the applications of
deep-learning in cognitive radio networks and the
Internet of things.
SALEEM RAZA received the bachelor’s degree in
electronic engineering and the master’s degree in
electronic systems engineering from the Mehran
University of Engineering and Technology,
Pakistan, in 2006 and 2012, respectively. He is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the Com-
munication and Networked Systems Research
Group, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg,
Magdeburg, Germany. During his Master studies,
he received the Erasmus Mundus Mobility for Life
scholarship for a research stay at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he
studied subjects on communication and broadcast networks, entrepreneur-
ship innovation and business models, and information and communication
technologies. His research area mainly focuses on wireless communication,
wireless sensor networks, and the Internet of things.
67926
ANGELINA POOLE received the bachelor’s
degree in computer science and engineering from
Santa Clara University in 2018. She is currently
pursuing the master’s degree in computer science
with the University of California at Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, CA, USA. At Santa Clara University,
she was a Research Assistant with the Internet
of Things Laboratory under the supervision of
Dr. B. Dezfouli.
MESUT GÜNEŞ received the M.Sc. equivalent
diploma degree in computer science and the Ph.D.
degree from RWTH Aachen University, Germany,
in 1998 and 2004, respectively. From 2004 to
2005, he was a Research Fellow at the Interna-
tional Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA,
USA. He was a Professor in distributed embedded
systems at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, from
2007 and to 2014. From 2014 to 2016, he was a
Professor in communication and networked sys-
tems at the University of Münster, Germany. He has been a Full Professor at
the Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg,
Magdeburg, Germany, since 2016. His research interests include distributed
communication systems, Internet of Things, wired and wireless computer
networks particularly wireless sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, and
mobile ad-hoc networks. He is involved in several national and international
research projects in the mentioned areas.
BEHNAM DEZFOULI received the Ph.D. degree
in computer science from University Technology
Malaysia in 2014. He is currently an Assistant
Professor at the Department of Computer Engi-
neering, Santa Clara University (SCU), USA.
Before joining SCU, he was a Post-Doctoral
Research Scientist and a Vising Assistant Profes-
sor at The University of Iowa, USA, from 2015 to
2016. He served as a Post-Doctoral Research Fel-
low and a Research Fellow with University Tech-
nology Malaysia, and the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, from
2014 to 2012, respectively. He is currently the PI of several IoT related
projects funded by Cypress Semiconductor, City of San Jose, and Santa
Clara Valley Water District. His research interests include Internet of Things,
cyber-physical systems, and wireless software-defined networking. He is an
Associate Editor of the IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS journal.
VOLUME 6, 2018